I’m brand new to Captivate, having used Storyline before… I was put off as a lot of IDs have said that it’s a much steeper learning curve that SL, but tbh I found SL really easy. I’m impressed with the additional functionality and I’m excited about the AR/VR functions!

Personal reasons and Captivate is what I cut my teeth on.

I’m a little late to this discussion. I am one of those odd ones who uses both Storyline and Captivate at work. I use Rise whenever there’s going to be tons of changes in the near future or the information is super text heavy (great for insurance related courses) and for when we need rapid development/deployment. I use Storyline for those times when I need an individual scrub bars on a multi-video SCORM (very easy to do) or to quickly change a PPT into a SCORM. Captivate is great for everything else, including software simulations. Here is my take on Captivate’s strengths:

VR is compatible with VR headsets (SL360 can only work with 360 images, but not headsets).

You can create custom hotspots (with a little tech-know-how and Illustrator).

Adding your own loading gif is super easy with Captivate. With SL360 it is a PITA that requires some basic HTML and remembering to include your file in the published product.

Password fields function like they do in real life with Captivate; this is important for software sims. SL360 uses a “font” approach to mimic asterisks.

Round-tripping is possible between various Adobe tools (and Microsoft word); SL360 has gotten good at this, but in the past the roundtrip link with CC tools would often break. There’s a video of a well known Articulate acolyte who talks about the round-tripping, but she never actually shows it happening (and for good reason because at the time Articulate was having issues with the round-trip links breaking).

You can change colors on vector graphics on the fly within Captivate (and there’s not need to round-trip for that).

Advanced actions and variables (when you get good at them) just work (can’t say the same thing for Storyline triggers and layers; more on that in a bit).

Shared actions are pretty cool and actually leads to faster development of a SCORM; SL360 has made it easier to copy large sets of triggers and has made them easier to move them around, but it still feels clunky compared to shared actions.

Responsive design can be truly responsive with Captivate, but time consuming to build. SL360 just scales the HTML. Rise, however, is truly responsive. Captivate doesn’t have anything at the moment to challenge Rise, including the review feature baked into Rise (which comes in very handy).

A note about triggers…I often find myself scratching my head and using techniques I picked up with Captivate 7/8 to pause slides (to keep them from advancing) in SL360. Sometimes the triggers work great and other times I just shake my fist at the eLearning gods and vent to my cat because what worked in another course no longer works in a course I’m currently working on. In contrast Captivate includes the little pause slider on objects in the timeline that will pause a slide (and you can easily change this feature on or off in the timing tab); the point is I sometimes find myself shaking my head at having to resort to older methods to do what should be a simple thing (thank heavens I had great Captivate teachers back in the day).

All that said SL360 does have many strengths most notably a shorter learning curve, individual scrub bars in a multi-video SCORM, layers, a nice library of assets, a more human centered language for the scripting portion of the program (what we call advanced actions and variables in Captivate), the ability to use multiple audio files within a single timeline (as well as layers, which can get complicated rather quickly), and SL360 also has those cool tools of sliders and dials. It’s no slouch of a program. It does some things more elegantly than Captivate and Captivate does other things more elegantly. There’s no perfect tool. It really does come down to preference, comfort, access, and time.

I will say this to close my thoughts, going forward Captivate is going to become more relevant than people realize. I’m sure you saw the preview that Dr. Jaisingh gave during eLearning World 21. 3D, layers, sliders, fully responsive, and so much more that hasn’t been revealed (like what improvements have been made to VR, how advanced actions and variables will work, and what changes to video/interactive video are coming). The team has made it look like Adobe XD, and that is a phenomenal leap forward. I believe the changes that are coming are going to be very impressive indeed. Now if Captivate can also find a way to bundle it with Adobe Stock they will win many hearts. I struggle to find decent images with the Articulate library, but Adobe Stock seldom disappoints.

I hope this discussion keeps going on. I’m new to Captivate, but I’ve used Presenter and Storyline for some time. It helps when someone else has discovered a unique difference before I find out the hard way. Or an advantage I didn’t realize.

One good thing about Captivate is this discussion forum. It seems there is a good community will to work and share ideas.