Why I Chose Camtasia Over Articulate Storyline and Captivate

When you develop, online video based training courses, you have a few options for development. You can use a rapid e-learning tools like Articulate Storyline or Captivate or you can use a tool like Camtasia, which differs from the others in that it specializes in giving you perfect screen recordings.

I’ve been an Instructional Designer for over 20 years and have learned the Articulate suite of tools and Captivate but have long since settled on Camtasia as my tool of choice for all my eLearning video training.

With that said, I still think it’s important to think through the type of course you are creating to determine which tool makes the most sense. Below are the main types of Video Based Training Courses I have created during my years as an Instructional Technologist.

• E-learning courses that have no real performance goals tied to them. Their purpose is to convey information or comply with regulations. This doesn’t mean that the information’s not important. It just means the purpose of the course is to disseminate the information, and not necessarily see a behavior change.
• Training courses that are designed to explain how to use the features of a software application (a software demo) or a website (a website tour) and the student can practice what they’ve learned by simply opening up the software application or the website.
• Blended courses that are a combination of training with live webinars and/or private forums. This interactivity allow students to ask questions and get feedback on what they have learned and can help transfer their learning to real projects.
• Online Training Courses with Quizzes. Occasionally, the client wants to ensure that the student can demonstrate their knowledge so they need some sort of quiz that provides feedback and, possibly, a score sent to a learning management system (LMS).

Any one of the development tools mentioned above will work for all of these types of e-learning courses. With some time dedicated to design they’ll all produce training that looks good and meet your or your customer’s goals. But for me, personally, even if my course doesn’t include recordings of my computer screen (aka screencasts) my default position is that I will always use Camtasia for all my video courses unless I can justify spending more money and time using Captivate or Articulate.

Let me explain.

The features in Camtasia are more than adequate to handle most e-learning needs. Why not go with what costs less and is easier to learn?

When I used Articulate/Storyline in the past primarily used it for “soft skills” training that took advantage of their multitudes of scenario based templates that lend themselves well to things like teaching sales or leadership. Also, the client if needed to have some kind of branching going on where, perhaps, I had two types of learners and I could send them each down a different path based on their responses to some questions. Storyline is used mainly by corporations when they need a variety of drag and drop style quizzes  and for large elearning courses without screen recordings. That’s been my experience.

Captivate is similar to Storyline is that includes lots of elearning templates that allow you to build a course with their existing assets, but unless you need software simulations it is not worth the learning curve.  Once again, just my opinion from using them both in the corporate world.

Articulate and Captivate are both much more than you need and too expensive for all of us who are trying to simply create a great video course (and make money from selling it) or create a beautiful video to showcase our products.

Camtasia, on the other hand, has just the right amount of no fluff features for pretty much any online course (or even marketing video) you or I would want to create. This post is not about going through the features. It is a response to the many people who have asked me to explain why I chose Camtasia over the other tools. As an Instructional Designer, and having worked in the corporate world for 8 years before opening up LearnCamtasia.com with Lon Naylor, I’v found Camtasia has all of features I’ve needed for all the different types of videos I’ve been tasked to create.

My belief is that if I’m the one paying for the software and creating my own course (or for a client) I want to create my training with minimal cost and minimal learning curve and the other tools are just too darn expensive, have too many bells and whistles too hard to learn and don’t take nearly as clear screen recordings as Camtasia does. Just one woman’s opinion, of course.

When you use Camtasia, the upfront and development costs are low, the tool is fairly easy to learn, and you can deliver a quality project rapidly. Whichever type of video training you need to create, it’s important to think through the requirements of your training course. So use Camtasia until you find you really need to commit more resources to a pricier tool with more capabilities for fancier testing and tracking. Use your best judgment to determine when that is and you’ll be able to help yourself (or your customers) get the type of quality eLearning course that fits your needs.