Choosing the right elearning authoring tool for your business can feel overwhelming. With a vast range of platforms, software, and systems on offer, you’ll need to really think about what your organizational goals are and exactly what features each platform offers – and at what price. This handy guide will help you compare the 12 most popular corporate elearning platforms on the market, so you can find your perfect match!

We have reviewed 12 of the best elearning authoring tools against the following criteria: quality of output, speed and efficiency of authoring, and scaling up of elearning production.

Read on to discover: 

• What are elearning authoring tools? 
• Is elearning software different to an authoring tool?
• Why do you need an authoring tool?
• Features of authoring tools
• Types of authoring tools
• Criteria for evaluating the best authoring tools
• 12 elearning authoring tools & software to consider
• Best elearning authoring tools – detailed review & comparison
• Business use cases for elearning software
• Conclusion
• Further Information

What are elearning authoring tools?

Elearning authoring tools are pieces of training and development software that enable the creation of digital learning content. This could be as simple as creating a Microsoft Word document, or as complex as a graphic design tool.

Instructional designers in L&D teams use elearning authoring tools to create training materials for their employees, which might cover compliance, onboarding, hard and soft skills, etc. These will typically be in the form of elearning courses, including features like click-to-reveal interactions, quizzes, and personalized and gamified content in more recent years.

Is elearning software different from an authoring tool?

Elearning software is a broad term that could be used to refer to many elements within a learning technology stack. Within the elearning software category, you’ll find software that focuses on different aspects of digital learning. For example:

• Elearning authoring tools, that are used to create effective, engaging corporate elearning courses.
• Learning Management Systems (LMSs), that automate the administration, testing, tracking, and reporting of these courses.
• Learning Content Management Systems (LCMSs), that are a one-stop-shop for creating, hosting, managing, and delivering content. These days, LCMSs can have all the benefits of an authoring tool, which is why some LCMSs, can be referred to as both an LCMS and an authoring tool.

Read more about the key differences in our guide to choosing the best LMS platform.

Why do you need an elearning authoring tool?

Unsure whether you need elearning authoring software to meet your workplace objectives? Here are the top five benefits you can expect to see from an authoring tool:

1. Allows you to personalize your content and adopt a people-centered approach to learning;
2. Enables you to collaborate with your team effectively, allowing authors, SMEs and stakeholders to work together seamlessly;
3. Makes it easy to roll out corporate elearning courses in different locations and update content to comply with new regulations quickly and with ease;
4. Allows you to continually improve your elearning courses by analyzing data and collating feedback on how your content performs;
5. Enables you to adapt to new demands and produce supporting digital learning content quickly.

Authoring tools features

Once you’ve decided elearning authoring software is the answer, you need to find the right tool. There are a number of features you need to consider:

• User-friendly interface: An intuitive interface means you can start building content straight away. Some products offer a free trial, so you can assess how easy it will be to build, share, duplicate, and update content.
• Collaboration capability: Effective collaboration produces better learning courses. Find out whether the authoring tool supports multiple users building, reviewing, and amending courses at the same time. Also, how easy it is to share your bespoke templates and company assets for re-use across your content and authoring teams. 
• Translation and localization features: If you’re reaching international learners, you’ll want to create courses in the right languages. Check to see whether the tool has a translations workflow – and even better, an auto-translate feature. Some tools also offer course variation functionality to help you manage localized or translated versions of a course.
• Authoring toolkit: If you’re looking for people-centered learning experiences, you might want to explore what options the tool provides for things like gamification and personalized learning. Check out some of the example courses created by the tool to get a good idea of the content output. 
• Ready-made templates: Expert-designed templates can help you choose the best interactions for your learning and save you time in development. Explore the templates the tool offers and how it recommends these to you. 
• Scope for customization: Some tools are designed to offer granular control over course layouts (the course interface, colors, fonts, positioning of assets etc.) – but at the expense of being complicated to use. Some offer more of a compromise. Take a look at user reviews of each tool to see what scope for customization there is, and how complex it’s likely to get. 
• Multi-device: Nowadays learners want to complete content on any device. Find out whether the tool produces content that works across desktop, tablet, and mobile and what additional effort authors need to invest to optimize the learning experience for these devices.

Types of authoring tools

There are many different elearning authoring tools to choose from. Understanding which type of tool is best suited to your organization could be a good starting point. Take a look at the different solutions available and find the best fit for you:

• Cloud-based tools: Flexible online or web-based authoring tools that allow authors to collaborate and work on the same digital learning content simultaneously. No installation is required, and all edits are saved to the cloud.
• Desktop-based tools: Powerful authoring tools that are run locally on desktops and require a download. These elearning platforms are typically run offline, meaning all edits are saved locally.
• Open-source tools: Web authoring tools where the original source code is made freely available. This gives flexibility to experienced developers who want to dig into complex code.
• Authoring tools built into Learning Management Systems (LMS): Simple elearning authoring tools that are included as part of an LMS package. They are often simple to use but limited in output.
• Free tools: Authoring tools with no cost required to start creating elearning – this often results in decreased quality and lack of scalability.

Criteria for evaluating the best elearning authoring tools

What makes a great elearning authoring tool? In this guide, the key criteria we have used to assess the best authoring tools are:

Quality of elearning output:

• The level of customization available
• The variety of formats to choose from
• Whether in-built design guidance is offered
• Options for gamification, personalization, and social polling 
• The level of data and reporting offered 

Speed and efficiency:

• How quickly you can produce high-quality elearning that’s optimized for all devices
• Collaboration options for streamlining the feedback process 
• Whether multiple authors can work on a project simultaneously
• The level of authoring experience required 
• How quickly you can publish and update courses 
• Whether there’s a translation workflow and/or auto-translate feature

Scalability:

• How easy it is to reuse, copy, and scale your corporate elearning content
• The level of control you have over your authors 
• Cost-efficiency for producing elearning content at scale
• Options to update assets and branding centrally

12 elearning authoring tools to consider

In this review, we’ll be taking a deeper dive into 12 online learning software examples you might want to consider. Specifically, we’ll be looking at: 

1. Elucidat – Helps teams to create an impactful elearning quickly and easily by unlocking expertise from any employee
2. Adobe Captivate – Gives experienced authors the power to create high-quality content
3. Articulate Storyline 360 – Ideal for individual users who prefer PowerPoint, with an added layer of customization
4. Articulate Rise 360 – Users with access to Articulate 360 can produce simple elearning courses fairly quickly
5. Gomo – Best for experienced learning designers that are not looking for advanced customization
6. Lectora – Gives traditional, capable authors an effective tool for producing HTML5 content
7. Adapt – Designed for technical authors who are looking to design bespoke HTML5 authoring through back-end design
8. DominKnow – Perfect for teams whose focus is on responsive screen capture and software simulation
9. Easygenerator – Authoring software designed for learning teams who need to create elearning content, easily
10. iSpring Suite – Desktop PowerPoint-based tool that’s a great option for novice learning designers who don’t have to worry about updating content regularly
11. Evolve – Built for teams who need to collaborate together and don’t mind putting in the time to learn how to use it
12. Camtasia – Video editing suite most commonly used for screen recordings, tutorials or product demos.

Save time comparing elearning software companies by downloading our authoring tool comparison template. We’ve completed the Elucidat column for you!

And here’s a handy comparison table to help you along.

Elearning software	Type of solution	Quality of output	Speed	Scalability
1. Elucidat	Elearning authoring platform	High	Fast	High
2. Adobe Captivate	Standalone authoring tool	High	Slow	Low
3. Articulate Storyline	Authoring suite	Medium	Slow	Low
4. Articulate Rise	Online authoring tool	Low	Fast	Medium
5. Gomo	Online authoring tool	Medium	Fast	High
6. Lectora	Standalone authoring tool	Medium	Slow	Medium
7. Adapt	Online authoring tool	Low	Fast	Medium
8. DominKnow	Online authoring tool	High	Average	Medium
9. Easygenerator	Online authoring tool	Medium	Fast	Medium
10. iSpring Suite	Authoring suite	Medium	Average	Medium
11. Evolve	Online authoring tool	Medium	Fast	Medium
12. Camtasia	Video authoring software	Medium	Medium	Low

Best elearning authoring tools – detailed review & comparison

1. Elucidat

Elucidat makes it easier for ambitious teams to produce quality workplace learning at scale. Being a fully cloud-based elearning authoring platform, organizations can open up and streamline their elearning production– without sacrificing quality.

With Elucidat you can empower anyone of any skill level to create digital learning ready for any device. From product training to compliance – Elucidat helps reduce costs and increase business performance. Read our guidelines to elearning best practices here.

Get to know Elucidat in this short video:

2. Adobe Captivate

Captivate is a desktop application known for its advanced authoring capabilities, particularly in creating simulations and systems training. However, it comes with a steep learning curve and isn’t set up well for collaborative working.

3. Articulate Storyline 360

Storyline 360 is a desktop tool that’s purchased as part of the Articulate 360 suite and uses a PowerPoint-style slide-based approach to elearning development. It’s very flexible in terms of what you can create, though comes with a steep learning curve and limitations when working collaboratively.

4. Articulate Rise 360

Rise 360 is a web-based authoring tool included as part of an Articulate 360 suite. It’s designed to be really easy to use and great for creating mobile-friendly learning experiences, but offers a limited authoring toolkit.

5. Gomo

Gomo is a cloud-based authoring tool that allows you to create web-style content that’s automatically optimized for mobile users. It’s a great tool for collaboration but there are a few small hurdles and restrictions in regards to authoring. 

6. Lectora Online

Lectora Online is an authoring tool by ELB Learning, that sits alongside it’s desktop equivalent. It can be powerful when you know how to use it, but comes with a steeper learning curve than many of the other tools.

7. Adapt Learning

Adapt is a free elearning authoring tool that creates responsive HTML5 content.

There are two component parts to the Adapt offering: The Adapt Framework is an open-source, front-end framework designed for use by developers. The Adapt Authoring Tool is the web-based application aimed at your average instructional designer with no coding experience. Neither can be used to host content – you’ll need an LMS for this.

8. DominKnow ONE

DominKnow ONE brings together its traditional authoring tool, Claro, with its responsive authoring tool and simulation creator, DominKnow Flow. This elearning software offers a vast authoring toolkit as well as some handy features for working at scale, though it may not be the easiest tool to pick up.

9. Easygenerator

Easygenerator is an elearning platform focused on creating straightforward digital learning content quickly. It doesn’t host content for you, making it more difficult to make content updates, though does benefit from some cloud-based collaboration features.

10. iSpring Suite

iSpring Suite is a desktop-based authoring tool that integrates with PowerPoint. While it’s easy for seasoned PowerPoint users to start using, it’s worth bearing in mind some technical hurdles, including that the tool is optimized for use on PC rather than Mac.

11. Evolve

Evolve is an online digital learning authoring tool designed for novice authors. It makes it quick and easy to create simple courses, though isn’t so efficient when creating very bespoke, large-scale content.

12. Camtasia

Camtasia is an all-in-one software suite for screen recording and video editing. Although foremost a video capture tool, content can also be exported as SCORM packages.

Due to its primary focus on video, Camtasia does not perform all the usual functions of an authoring tool, and so is often integrated, or used alongside other elearning authoring software.

Business use cases for elearning software

Elearning software can be utilized in a number of ways, across multiple business verticals to provide impact. We’ve highlighted some areas below: 

Compliance training

For finance companies, providing engaging, digestible compliance training is critical. Elearning software enables organizations to produce powerful elearning material at scale, and quickly, to keep pace with the ever-changing regulatory landscape. 

Retail training

Keeping pace in a rapidly shifting industry such as retail can be impossible without the right elearning software. With the right tool, retail companies can produce exceptional learning that addresses the big challenges and ever-changing needs of retail customers. 

Sales training 

Educating employees on effective sales methods and tactics is important for organizations looking to boost sales and attract the right type of customer. Authoring tools can help company managers to produce and manage highly customizable, branded digital learning at scale.

Employee upskilling 

Organizations looking to provide employees with goal-oriented online training designed around specific skills should take advantage of authoring tools in order to track employee engagement, success rates, and the impact of their elearning.

In conclusion

There’s a lot of overlap in the functionality of the best elearning authoring tools shown here, but your requirements – such as the quality and scale at which you want to produce digital learning – will narrow down your shortlist. Ultimately, finding the best corporate elearning authoring software for you and your team will depend on your needs.

If you need to produce high-quality content at scale, then an authoring tool like Elucidat would be a great fit for you.

Let us know your specific authoring needs, book a demo to learn more, and get set up with a free trial account.

Further information

To help you make the right choice and also to get you thinking about your wider elearning tech stack and strategy, check out some of our other top content:

Overview of tools that includes LMS’s:

• Choosing the best SCORM compliant LMS 
• How to implement an effective employee training program
• The free elearning templates that will save you hours
• A guide to HTML5 elearning authoring tools
• The 8 best SCORM authoring tools

Elucidat and Lectora; two authoring tools, both recognized for outputting some of the world’s best elearning courses. But what makes them unique? What’s included with the Lectora package? And how does this compare to Elucidat’s offering – particularly when it comes to working at scale? Let’s find out…

How will we compare these authoring tools?

• Ease of use
• Quality output
• Production speed
• Scalability
• Who it’s best suited for
• Pros and cons

Comparing multiple tools? Save time with this handy authoring tool comparison template.

Is Elucidat a good alternative to Lectora?

What is Elucidat?

Elucidat is a multi-award winning, cloud-based elearning authoring tool that organizations can use to produce high-quality courses at scale, which makes it the perfect alternative to Lectora. 

Get to know Elucidat and how our authoring platform can benefit your organization in this short 3-minute video:

Ease of use

Anyone can pick up Elucidat and start authoring. It has a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) interface, so you can see exactly how your course is going to look as you build it. And the layout of each page will automatically adapt according to different devices, rather than just re-size, providing a truly responsive experience for your learners – without additional effort from you.

Novice authors might choose to start with one of our expert-designed templates from ready-made Templates, for instance to create a quiz, game, or case study. These templates come with all the pages and interactions required – all you need to do is add the text and images.

But it’s also pretty easy to build from scratch in Elucidat – simply pull in your brand style, and then combine any of the 25+ pre-built interactions and question types to create a unique learning experience. 

For teams looking to expand their production to new authors and SMEs, the Company Templates feature will help ensure quality outputs. With this approach, your L&D team can set up pre-approved, branded company templates, and pack them with inline guidance written specifically for your authors, meaning best practice and consistent learning design will be baked into all the courses your organization churns out.

Quality output 

In terms of what you can expect from an authoring side of things, Elucidat ticks all the boxes, providing staple interactions like click-to-reveals and drag and drop activities – plus carousels, timelines, and more. But you can also use Elucidat to break the mold of traditional elearning…

You can personalize your courses using a role-selector, diagnostic quiz, or interactive video, putting the learner at the center of their experience. You can also encourage them to reflect on their personal journey by including Text Input Clips, requiring them to input their thoughts and ideas, which you can play back to them later. 

Courses can also be gamified by adding features like badges and point systems, adding a competitive element to your content. 

You can even encourage your learners to think more deeply about your content by embedding social polls, where they answer a question and see how their response compares to their peers’.

Production speed

The whole development workflow in Elucidat is designed to be quick and hassle-free.

For a start, the simplicity of Elucidat means your course creation process can be as rapid or as thorough as you want it to be. In fact, ready-made Templates means you can create and publish courses four times faster than building a course from scratch.

Once a course is ready for review, you simply send an email to reviewers, inviting them to add comments directly to your content – they don’t even need to set up an Elucidat account. Multiple people can review and amend the course simultaneously, without encountering version control issues – meaning you can reduce your turnaround times in a risk-free way.

And because all content is hosted in the cloud, any updates you make to a published course will feed through instantly to your learners– regardless of where that course is hosted. This makes it super quick to correct typos, replace images, and update your text.

If you need to reach a global audience, Auto-Translate also speeds up the localization process, with the ability to translate your content instantly into one of 75 different languages, without the need to export and import anything. 

Scalability 

Elucidat is designed for organizations who need to create and manage vast amounts of content. For instance, you can also use Variations workflow to create and edit multiple courses at once. With this function, when you make changes to a “Parent Course”, these changes will be instantly pulled through toits Variations (for instance, localized versions of that course). 

What’s more, the centralized Asset Library allows you to make mass updates to images and videos that sit across several courses, for instance, if you need to update a company logo. 

Working in large teams is supported by multi-language authoring and a pricing structure that becomes more competitive the more users you have. And there are no hidden fees for things like storage.

Finally, you can remove the risk of opening up your production teams using Advanced User Management. This allows you to customize the User Roles for each person in your Elucidat account, determining who can, for example, edit your brand styles, delete projects, or upload assets, ensuring your users work to their strengths.

Who it is best for 

Elucidat is designed to be used by content creators, SMEs, and instructional designers of any experience level. It’s most beneficial for large teams looking to create a lot of content quickly, without sacrificing quality.

Main pros and cons of Elucidat

WYSIWYG interface simplifies content creation.  Content is automatically optimized for mobile view.  Offers a wide range of interaction types, supporting personalization, gamification, and social polls. Ready-made templates makes authoring 4x faster.   Company Templates allows you to onboard new authors easily.  Translate into 75 languages instantly.  Assets can be updated in several places at once.  Offers granular control over which users can do what.   Live reviews and instant publishing. Enables mass updates to course variations. Authoring interface available in nine languages. Can involve as many reviewers as you need, free of charge.

The pricing model may seem expensive for small teams with limited content. A time investment is required for novice authors to take advantage of the full toolkit. No systems training capabilities. No images/videos supplied by the tool.

Lectora review

What is Lectora?

Lectora is an authoring tool by ELB Learning. There is an online version and a desktop version of Lectora, which both come as part of ELB’s Course Authoring Gold Suite, along with ReviewLink, their online course review tool, and their inbuilt Asset Library, so we will be reviewing these products as a package. 

Ease of use

The jury is still out on just how easy Lectora is to use. On the plus side, it has a WYSIWYG interface, where everything in the middle of the screen – or “on stage” – represents what’s visible to the learners, and everything around the edges – or “off stage” – will stay hidden. This gives a full picture of what you are building as you go.

Lectora also offers over 3,500 pre-built templates for you to select and populate to create out-of-the-box courses, as well as a PowerPoint convertor, making it relatively simple to turn a PPT file into an interactive course – albeit with some manual editing.

The challenges with Lectora tend to crop up when creating more bespoke content…

Lectora’s authoring interface has been criticized over the years for being hard to navigate. Whilst ELB have been making improvements to this, it can still feel quite overwhelming; The drag-and-drop workspace and layers panel are similar to traditional design applications but aren’t intuitive for the average author. Plus, it’s easy to get lost in the numerous tabs and menus that sit “off stage”, so working from scratch and customizing content can be tricky. 

And while it can be used to create fully responsive courses, authors can expect to invest more time and effort into tweaking layouts for mobile and tablet devices than with Elucidat.    

There is a wealth of online guidance about using the tool on the ELB website, but finding the right information only adds to the complexity of onboarding.

Quality Output

It could be argued that what Lectora lacks in usability, it makes up for in scope and functionality, which help ensure good quality courses. 

For a start, the tool boasts a unique “error check” function. This handy QA feature runs before a course is published and highlights issues such as missing or repetitive content, helping to ensure quality across all your finished courses.

In terms of design options, authors can create personalized learning experiences through BranchTrack, which is used to construct branching scenarios. This gives learners the chance to apply their knowledge to role play scenarios or system simulations, allowing them to carve out their own learning journey.

Other personalization options include role selectors and diagnostic quizzes – though notably, there is no equivalent to Elucidat’s Text Input Clips. 

Similar to Elucidat, lectora offers out-of-the-box games for you to populate, helping you turn dry content into fun quizzes. 

Whatever you create, your pages are highly customizable and can be made to look however you like – once you have got the hang of the tool.

Production speed

Because of its complex interface, authoring in Lectora will typically take longer than in other tools. However, there are workarounds; You can use the ‘ModDev’ toolkit to assemble a response course in half the usual time, or select a Course Starter template, which will provide all the pages needed for a course, ready for you to populate. 

The built-in Asset Library also helps speed up the authoring process, offering icons, cut out characters, audio, video, photos and more, saving you time digging around company files and libraries to populate your course. 

However, once the first draft of a course is complete, collaboration and publishing can be a little clunky; To share the course for review, you’ll need to publish it to ReviewLink, which adds an extra step in the workflow. And when it comes to involving additional authors, simultaneous editing is not properly supported – instead, it’s recommended that authors “check in and out” their course each time they pass it on for amends. What’s more, publishing the final product for SCORM (for an LMS) or HTML (for web) involves downloading and uploading files, which can start to feel cumbersome. 

Finally, while the translation tool and multi-language publishing options are designed to speed up translations, there is no instant translation option, like there is with Elucidat.

Scalability 

Like with Elucidat, Lectora allows you to save and re-use templates and styles across courses. However, the more content you create, the harder it becomes to manage; There’s currently no asset management system in place, which means you can’t make global updates to the images or videos you embed in your courses. Plus, there is no way of updating multiple variations of a course simultaneously, for example if you have localized versions. 

In terms of costs, Lectora prices are geared towards individual users and small teams, and don’t reflect economies of scale – especially when you consider costs for additional storage. 

Who its best suited for

Small teams or individual users who have the time and budget to master the tool and create simulations, branching scenarios, or games.

Main pros and cons of Lectora

Used to build systems simulations, branching scenarios, and games.  Built-in QA checks. Built-in asset library includes templates, images, videos and more.  ReviewLink collates feedback in one central location. Can easily turn PPTs into interactive courses.  ModDev workflow speeds up authoring. Authoring possible in seven languages.  Courses are very customizable. Can involve as many reviewers as you need, free of charge.

Authoring interface is overwhelming and takes time to get used to. No central asset management. No way to make mass updates to course variations. Responsive authoring typically involves manual tweaking.   Storage limits. Relatively expensive for large numbers of users. Comparatively slow publishing, reviews, and translations.    No social polling capabilities.

Summary – is Elucidat a good alternative to Lectora?

Lectora is a very functional authoring tool that covers a lot of ground. You can use it to create systems training, simulated roleplays, quizzes, and more, all of which can be customized however you like. And whatever you choose to create, the inbuilt Asset Library and QA checker can save you time in development.

However, Lectora is not the most intuitive tool out there – it can be fiddly to use and involves a steep learning curve and lengthy onboarding process. 

Conversely, Elucidat’s simple interface makes expanding your production teams quick and easy. And, if in doubt, Company Templates will ensure all your authors are applying best practice learning design to every course. 

Elucidat also makes working at scale simple, by way of centralized Asset Management and the Variations Manager, allowing you to make mass updates to content. And of course, you can breeze through your production pipeline with streamlined reviews, updates, and translations. 

Unlike Lectora, Elucidat’s pricing structure reflects economies of scale. And there are no hidden costs for storing unexpected amounts of content. So, for enterprise organizations looking to create high quality learning experiences at scale, it’s a no-brainer.

How Elucidat shapes up against other tools 

• 12 Popular Elearning Authoring Tools: A review of some of the best elearning authoring tools against quality of output, speed and efficiency, and scaling up of elearning production.
• Storyline & Captivate: An evaluation on how Elucidat stacks up against Articulate Storyline 360 and Adobe Captivate.
• iSpring Suite: An exploration as to whether Elucidat can be used as an alternative to the desktop authoring suite iSpring.
• Easygenerator: A review of Elucidat against the authoring tool Easygenerator, to see why organization may choose one over the other.  
• Storyline & Rise: A comparison of Elucidat against Articulate 360’s two authoring tools. 
• Gomo Learning: A comparative review of Gomo Learning and Elucidat.
• Evolve: A side-by-side comparison of Elucidat and the cloud-based authoring tool Evolve.

Explore Elucidat 

To explore the benefits of Elucidat for yourself, book a personalized demo with one of the team, and start a free trial.

Next in our tool comparison series, we look at how Elucidat compares to Evolve. With both cloud-based authoring platforms being recognized for their speed and ease of use, why might you choose one over the other? Let’s find out…

How will we compare these authoring tools?

• Ease of use
• Quality output
• Production speed
• Scalability
• Who it’s best suited for
• Pros and cons

Comparing multiple tools? Save time with this handy authoring tool comparison template.

Evolve vs. Elucidat: At-a-glance comparison table

	Elucidat	Evolve
Solution	Cloud-based authoring tool	Cloud-based authoring tool
Digital learning formats	HTML5, SCORM (1.2, 2004), xAPI (TinCan)	HTML5, SCORM, xAPI (TinCan)
Production speed	Fast	Fast
Easy to use?	Easy	Moderately easy
Perfect for	Enterprise organizations who want to expand their authoring teams to create high-impact courses quickly and at scale.	Novice elearning authors who want to create courses quickly and smaller organizations.
Price	Contact us for pricing.	Starting at $567 per user per year.

Is Elucidat a good alternative to Evolve?

What is Elucidat?

Elucidat is a multi-award winning, cloud-based elearning authoring tool that can be used to produce high-quality courses at scale. 

With refined features like Advanced User Management and Guided Authoring, Elucidat helps teams work smarter by streamlining production and controlling outputs – without sacrificing that ‘wow factor’ that all courses should have.

Get to know Elucidat in this short 3-minute video:

Ease of use

Elucidat offers different ways of working to suit authors of all abilities, giving your organization the option to expand production.

Inexperienced authors may choose to start with one of our expert-designed templates from Learning Accelerator, for instance to create a quiz, game, or case study. Each template will include all the pages and interactions you need— simply populate them with your own text and imagery. And if you want help choosing a template, a diagnostic questionnaire will even recommend one for you.

It’s also pretty easy to build from scratch in Elucidat – simply assign your pre-made brand style, and then combine any of the 25+ pre-built interactions and question types. The intuitive interface and streamlined settings make it easy to configure your templates, without overwhelming you with extensive menus and endless customization options.  

For large and dispersed teams who want to embed quality and consistency across their courses, Guided Authoring will help support the onboarding of new authors and SMEs. With this feature, your Learning & Development team can set up pre-approved, branded company templates, and pack them with inline guidance written specifically for your authors. This makes opening up your production simple. See how cloud banking experts, nCino did just that.

Whichever authoring approach you take, because Elucidat uses a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) interface, you can see exactly how your course is going to look for learners as you build it. The layout of each page will also automatically adapt according to different devices, rather than just re-size, providing a truly responsive experience for your learners – without additional effort.  

So whatever the size of your authoring team, how diverse it is, and the level of experience your authors have, Elucidat should be simple for everyone to use. 

Quality output 

Elucidat supports forward-thinking learning design. Our authoring toolkit offers all the staple interactions you’re used to seeing, such as click-to-reveals and drag and drop questions, plus carousels, timelines, and more. But you can also leverage gamification, by adding features like badges and point systems, or personalize your content using a role-selector, diagnostic quiz, or branching scenario. 

You can even encourage your learners to think more deeply about the content by embedding social polls, where they answer a question and see how their response compares to their peers’. 

With all these options at your fingertips, you can create people-centered and contemporary learning experiences that will resonate with even the most diverse audiences.

Not to mention, all Elucidat courses are underpinned by the analytics dashboard which is powered by xAPI and gives you plenty of data to see what’s working well and where you could make changes for the future.

Production speed

Elucidat will allow your teams to develop and roll out content quickly. For a start, the simplicity of Elucidat means the authoring process can be as rapid or as thorough as you want it to be. In fact, Learning Accelerator means authors can create and publish courses quicker than ever before. 

And if you need to reach a global audience, Auto-Translate also speeds up the localization process, with the ability to translate your content instantly into one of 75 different languages, with just the click of a button.

Once a course has been created, authors can invite reviewers to add comments directly to content, without requiring them to set up an Elucidat account. Comments are easy to log and view, and multiple people can work on a course simultaneously, meaning you can reduce review timelines without compromising quality. 

Finally, because all content is hosted in the cloud, any updates that your team make to a published course will feed through instantly – regardless of whether that course is hosted via a URL or your LMS. If you are looking to change your LMS, we have a LMS comparison guide you can dive into.

Scalability 

With Elucidat, organizations can efficiently develop big chunks of content with consistent results. 

For a start, you can easily create and save bespoke templates and Brand Styles to re-use across projects. And of course, Guided Authoring will ensure authors of all abilities create courses that align with each other – and your brand. 

Managing content updates across courses is easy; the centralized Asset Library allows you to make mass updates to images and videos, for instance if you need to update your brand logo. You can also use the Variations workflow to edit multiple courses at once. With this function, when you make changes to a “Parent Course” (for instance, to the background color), these changes will be replicated in its ”child course” Variations (which could be, for instance, localized versions of that course). This way, authors benefit from speedy workflows and consistent outputs – even when there’s a surplus of courses on the go.

Working efficiently in large teams is made possible, due to the fact several authors can work on a course at once. Plus, Advanced User Management allows you to customize the User Roles for each person in your Elucidat account, determining who can, for example, edit your brand styles, delete projects, or upload assets. This means you can remove the risks of bringing colleagues from across the business into your authoring platform.

Who it is best for 

Elucidat is designed to be used by content creators, SMEs, and instructional designers of all different levels. It’s most beneficial for large teams looking to create a lot of content quickly, without sacrificing quality.

Main pros and cons of Elucidat

Pros

Cons

WYSIWYG interface simplifies content creation.  Content is automatically optimized for mobile view.  Offers a wide range of interaction types, enabling personalization and gamification.  Learning Accelerator makes building courses quicker than ever.   Guided Authoring allows you to expand production, whilst maintaining content quality.  Auto-Translate translates course content instantly into 75 languages.  Advanced user controls help manage large teams. Live reviews speed up the review process. Instant publishing, even to an LMS.  Variations manager enables mass updates across courses. Inbuilt data analytics help drive content improvements.

The pricing model may seem expensive for small teams with limited courses to produce. A time investment is required for novice authors to take advantage of full toolkit. No systems training capabilities. Fewer design customization options than Evolve.

Evolve review

What is Evolve?

Evolve is a cloud-based authoring tool by Intellum, that’s designed to be quick and easy to use.

Ease of use

The overall authoring experience with Evolve is relatively simple, but it can take a while to get used to.

Amongst its advantages, the tool has a user-friendly interface, where authors can easily create blocks of content and then drag and drop their chosen interaction to each block. The Quick Preview mode also allows them to see what their final course will look like as they build it. Plus, like Elucidat, content is automatically optimized for mobile.  

If authors want to start building quickly, they can select pre-built course templates. However, if they want to build from scratch, there’s a fairly steep learning curve. The extensive setting options can increase the workload, with some users reporting that the vast menus and submenus within blocks, articles, components, and pages are a little overwhelming. 

Authors will also need to get the hang of versioning as they build, as if content is accidentally deleted, they will need to revert to a previous back-up to retrieve it.

Quality output

A big selling point of Evolve is its vast authoring toolkit and flexibility. For a start, Evolve allows authors to customize pretty much anything, providing full control over even the finest design details.

Evolve also offers a competitive range of interaction types to choose from. It includes all the standard interactions but also a handful of less typical ones, such as infographics, dialogues, and social MCQs. It also has out-of-the-box interactions available to create system simulations, multi-player games, and interactive videos.

However, whilst Evolve can be used to create really engaging single courses, it’s harder to manage quality when working at a large scale. This is because there are few capabilities for implementing global updates and managing user permissions, meaning that quality can be affected when there’s a heavy production pipeline, with people losing track of what changes have been made where. 

Production speed

Evolve’s Quick Preview option and vast range of out-of-the-box interactions means it’s quick to set up a basic course. (Of course, the process is slowed down when there’s a lot of customizing to be done.)  

But unfortunately, whilst you can publish a course straight to the Intellum learning platform, course publications for other LMSs follow the traditional SCORM package-LMS route, so you’ll need to allow time between creation and launch.

Furthermore, translating content can be a clunky process, as you will need to export your files and translate them using an external tool, before importing them back into Evolve. 

Scalability 

Evolve makes it fairly easy to work across a large amount of content. Like with Elucidat, authors of this platform can easily set up and re-use templates and themes, as well as make global updates to assets.

What the tool could benefit from would be an ability to manage course variations. For instance, for authors to be able to update an image, font or color in one course and have it automatically feed into localized versions of that course.

Because it’s cloud-based, collaboration within small teams is pretty good. Evolve includes a Review and Comment feature so colleagues can add a comment to any part of a course and the elearning creator will see it instantly. Users can also invite anyone to review a course (though each reviewer will need to create an Evolve account).

However, working in large, complex teams starts to get clunky, as there is less control over user permissions than there is with Elucidat. 

Who it is best for

Overall, Evolve could be a good option for small teams of colleagues, who have simple design requirements or have been afforded the time to create highly customized courses. 

It’s not ideally placed for large teams working at scale, who need to involve lots of people in their content development.

Main pros and cons of Evolve

Pros	Cons
A WYSIWYG interface simplifies authoring.  Content is automatically optimized for different devices. Recognized for speedy authoring.  Provides a good range of out-of-the-box interaction types, including some not offered by competitors. Makes it easy to create games and simulations.  Offers highly customizable templates and themes.  Live reviews speed up production.	Setting up and customizing themes can be fiddly.  There are per user storage limits for assets.  Lack of user controls when working in large teams.  Some clunky processes e.g. course translations and localizations.  No data analytics inbuilt. Reviewers need an Evolve account set up.  Authors need to get the hang of the versioning workflow to avoid losing content.

Summary – is Elucidat a good alternative to Evolve?

Evolve is a great option for small teams of authors who are new to elearning and want to get started building courses quickly. It offers lots of pre-built interactions they can cherry pick to create a wide range of fun and contemporary learning experiences. 

For bigger employers who want to take things to the next level, Elucidat offers the same easy-to-use, cloud-based editing environment, but with the added bonus of features specifically designed for teams working at scale; the fact that it offers simplified processes for translations and localizations means it’s ideal for creating and hosting vast amounts of content. 

Elucidat is also more suitable for managing large teams of content creators; Guided Authoring and Advanced User Management enable Learning & Development teams to set up their authors for design success, and remove the risks associated with bringing in new users from across the business. 

What’s more, working at scale won’t mean saying goodbye to creativity – Elucidat offers an extensive authoring toolkit and enables authors to easily build content that will really pack a punch.  

How Elucidat shapes up against other tools 

• 12 Popular Elearning Authoring Tools: A review of some of the best elearning authoring tools against quality of output, speed and efficiency, and scaling up of elearning production.
• Storyline & Captivate: An evaluation on how Elucidat stacks up against Articulate Storyline 360 and Adobe Captivate.
• iSpring Suite: An exploration as to whether Elucidat can be used as an alternative to the desktop authoring suite iSpring.
• Easygenerator: A review of Elucidat against the authoring tool Easygenerator.  
• Storyline & Rise: A comparison of Elucidat against Articulate 360’s two authoring tools. 
• Gomo Learning: A comparative review of Gomo Learning and Elucidat.
• Lectora Online: A review of how Elucidat compares to cloud-based authoring tool Lectora Online.

Explore Elucidat 

To explore the benefits of Elucidat for yourself, book a personalized demo with one of the team, and start a free trial.

Elucidat and Easygenerator are two excellent authoring platforms, both known for their usability and speed of authoring. But what differentiates these highly-regarded tools, and why might an organization be steered towards one over the other? Let’s take a closer look…

How will we compare these authoring tools?

• Ease of use
• Quality output
• Production speed
• Scalability
• Who it’s best suited for
• Pros and cons

Comparing multiple tools? Save hours of time with this handy authoring tool comparison template. We’ve completed the Elucidat column for you.

Is Elucidat a good alternative to Easygenerator?

What is Elucidat?

Elucidat is a multi-award-winning, cloud-based authoring tool that enables you to produce high-impact online courses at scale. 

Get to know Elucidat in this short 3-minute video:

Ease of use

Creating content in Elucidat is easy – if you don’t have the time to build from scratch, you can select one of our expert-designed templates from Learning Accelerator to create a quiz, game, case study, or other types of course. Each template will include all the pages and interactions you need— simply populate them with your own text and imagery, using inline guidance for direction.

If you don’t know what template to choose, there’s even guidance for that – complete the short questionnaire, and we will recommend one for you.

Whether you build using templates or from scratch, because Elucidat uses a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) interface, you can see exactly how your course is going to look as you create it, simplifying the whole authoring process.  

The final layout of each page will automatically adapt according to different devices, rather than just re-size, providing a truly responsive experience for your learners – without additional effort.  

Quality output

There are endless possibilities around the type of experience you can create in Elucidat. Interactions include all the staple options for elearning, plus carousels, timelines, and more. And to take your instructional design up a notch, you can gamify content by adding novel features, like quiz timers, and competitive elements, such as points systems and badges.

There’s also the option to create personalized learning; You can add a role selector or diagnostic quiz to your course to tailor what content is served to your learners or incorporate branching videos/scenarios to allow them to carve out their own learning journey. This way, content is people-centered and will resonate with even the most diverse audiences.

There’s also opportunity for social learning – use social polls to ask your learners questions and compare their responses to their peers, encouraging self-reflection and inspiring conversations outside of the training. 

Whatever type of content you’re creating, Elucidat offers you total creative freedom. Your designers won’t be restricted to page grids or columns when they build, so they can lay out pages exactly how they envisioned.  

Production speed

Elucidat’s feature branded Company Templates means you can create and publish courses four times faster than before. 

Auto-Translate also speeds up the localization process, with the ability to translate your content instantly into one of 75 different languages.

Cloud-based authoring means it’s quick and easy to publish, share, and review courses, making Elucidat a great option for large teams. And because all content is hosted in the cloud, any updates you make to a published course will feed through instantly – regardless of whether that course is hosted via a URL or on your LMS. 

Scalability

Elucidat’s Guided Authoring workflow enables you to open up your team of content creators; your Learning & Development team can set up pre-approved company templates which are branded according to your organization and packed with inline guidance, written specifically for your team of authors. This makes it easy for novice authors and SMEs to start building whilst embedding quality and consistency across all content with your organization.

See how cloud banking experts, nCino, used Elucidat to open up their elearning production. 

You can remove the risks of bringing colleagues from across the business into your authoring platform with Advanced User Management. This allows you to customize the User Roles for each person in your Elucidat account. With full control over which users can, for example, edit your brand styles, delete projects, or upload assets, you can manage even the most dynamic teams and ensure each user is working to their strengths. 

Elucidat helps you ensure consistency across content, even on large-scale projects. You can easily create and save bespoke Brand Styles, as well as use the Variations Manager to make updates to content across several courses at once. Plus, the centralized Asset Library allows you to make mass updates to images and videos – a big time saver if a company logo or diagram changes.

Who it’s best suited for

Elucidat is ideally placed for enterprise organizations that need to create impactful elearning as part of a wide team.

Pros 

• Super speedy authoring with Learning Accelerator.
• Guided Authoring opens up content production to novice authors and SMEs.
• Cloud-based reviews enable seamless collaboration and more efficient workflows. 
• Advanced User Management provides granular control over user permissions, removing the risk of opening up your content production. 
• Instant publishing and updates speed up your production.
• Creates people-centered learning experiences to maximize engagement.
• Offers endless design possibilities, with flexible layouts and a variety of interactions to choose from. 
• Inbuilt data analytics drive improvements from within the tool itself.

Cons

• It can take time to master the full authoring toolkit. 
• Images and videos must be supplied by users.
• Prices are geared towards enterprise organizations.

Easygenerator review

What is Easygenerator?

Easygenerator is an authoring tool that’s designed to simplify and accelerate the creation, localization, and sharing of elearning courses. Whilst it does not host the LMS-delivered content itself (the output will be a SCORM package you upload and reupload if there are changes), the tool does benefit from cloud-based collaboration. 

Ease of use

As the name suggests, Easygenerator is known for straightforward authoring. You can start with pre-built course templates or use the PowerPoint import feature to convert a slide deck into an interactive SCORM course. 

Content is assembled by dragging and dropping component parts. Like Elucidat, it will also automatically adapt to different devices, saving your authors time when they want to create a truly responsive learning experience.  

However, the interface is not entirely WYSIWYG, so there is a disconnect between what you see whilst authoring and what the learner will see. For example, when setting up a multiple-choice question, you can easily input the question text, answer options, and feedback, but you won’t be able to see exactly how this will appear to the learner. To do this, you will need to select the “preview” button each time a change is made, which opens in a new browser tab. This can be a little laboring and slows down the authoring process. 

Quality output

Easygenerator courses look clean and professional. However, some users report there being restrictions on how you can lay out your content on a page, which means you might not be able to achieve the exact look and feel you’re after. 

In terms of what you can create with the tool, there are built-in options to record and edit walkthrough videos and voiceovers, making it a good option for creating media-rich content. 

However, the variety of learning experiences Easygenerator can support is limited. Whilst it does offer interactions such as flip cards and hotspots, it doesn’t include some of the staple elearning interactions you see elsewhere, such as accordions and other click-to-reveal items. 

Gamification and personalized learning are also not supported, and because SCORM content isn’t hosted by Easygenerator, there’s no option for social polling. For organizations looking for contemporary, people-focused learning experiences, it might not be the ideal tool.

Production speed

Easygenerator is a handy tool in terms of speed of production. It’s really quick to perform tasks like creating quiz questions and videos. You can also select images and videos from within the tool using the in-built asset library, making it easier and faster to populate your templates.

When it comes to creating global content, you have the option to automatically translate your courses into 75 languages.

Because Easygenerator doesn’t use cloud hosting, content updates can also be clunky; updates to courses published via SCORM to an LMS will require you to download, edit, and re-upload a new SCORM file, which can be a pain if you just want to correct a typo. Additionally, each language will need its own SCORM package, which adds to the time that is spent on QA and LMS admin for multi-language courses.

Scalability

Working at scale is supported by the fact that you can easily upload your company’s brand elements and save custom templates for reuse across your organization. However, there is no function to manage course variations (which is a big time saver when you want to update something like a background color on multiple courses at once or add a new page to 10s of courses in one go).  

Once a course has been built, reviewing and collaborating are supported by the cloud, streamlining your workflows. You can efficiently manage your teams by creating designated groups to share, review, and transfer content. 

Like with Elucidat, you can also assign roles to users, which determine what control they have over the content. However, there’s no option to customize permission sets – an option that can be useful for managing large teams. Instead, you’re restricted by the pre-set user roles Easygenerator provides.

Who it’s best suited for

Easygenerator is quick and easy to use for small teams of authors looking to create simple courses.

Pros 

• It’s easy to create certain types of content, such as video walkthroughs.
• It quickly converts PowerPoint files into SCORM courses, speeding up production when a rudimentary course will do.
• Great customer service in 100+ languages to support global teams. 
• Seamless cloud-based reviews and collaboration.
• Inbuilt data analytics to drive improvements from within the tool.
• Automatically translate your courses into 75 languages.

Cons 

• No social polls, gamification, or personalization options, limiting opportunities to innovate.
• Content is heavily templated and not fully flexible, restricting visual designers.
• Interface is not WYSIWYG, slowing down the authoring process.
• Prices are more for a mass market rather than large teams.
• Course updates can be clunky.

Summary – is Elucidat a good alternative to Easygenerator?

Easygenerator can help teams create courses quickly. However, Elucidat can be seen as a better solution for creating high-impact content at scale, especially for larger teams. 

Why? 

With Elucidat, you can expand your teams and open up content production without compromising quality; the Templates feature embeds consistent design across your courses, allowing any SME to get involved in authoring, while Advanced User Management provides complete granular control over who does what in your account. Get additional people working on more content whilst avoiding the “too many chefs” pitfall.  

Eluicidat also makes it faster to work at scale, with the Variations Manager simplifying course localizations and cloud-based hosting enabling you to make instant content updates. No more redownloading a SCORM and reuploading to your LMS just to fix a typo!

Finally, learning experiences delivered via Elucidat are people-centered. With vast options to personalize elearning and gamify your courses, even novice authors can create content that strikes a chord.

How Elucidat shapes up against other tools:

• 12 Popular Elearning Authoring Tools: A review of twelve of the best elearning authoring tools against quality of output, speed and efficiency of authoring, and scaling up of elearning production.
• Storyline & Captivate: An evaluation on how Elucidat stacks up as an alternative to the desktop-based platforms Articulate Storyline 360 and Adobe Captivate.
• Evolve: A side-by-side comparison of Elucidat and the cloud-based authoring tool Evolve. 
• Storyline & Rise: A comparison of Elucidat against Articulate 360’s two authoring tools. 
• Gomo: A comparative review of Gomo Learning and Elucidat.
• Lectora Online: A review of how Elucidat compares to cloud-based authoring tool Lectora Online.

Want to find out more?

Start a free trial of Elucidat to see what it can do. We’ll get you off to a great start with a tailored demo.

How does Elucidat stack up against the iSpring suite? Is Elucidat a good alternative to iSpring? Let’s review the two elearning authoring tools and see how they compare…

In our latest product review, we compare and contrast Elucidat with a desktop-based authoring tool, iSpring. Where does each tool win? Find out below. 

How will we compare these authoring tools?

• Ease of use
• Quality output
• Production speed
• Scalability
• Who it’s best suited for
• Pros and cons

Save hours comparing tools with this handy authoring tool comparison template. We’ve filled Elucidat column is already completed for you!

Is Elucidat a good alternative to Spring?

What is Elucidat?

Elucidat is a multi-award winning, cloud-based elearning authoring tool that enables anyone to produce high-quality online courses at scale. 

Get to know Elucidat in this quick 3-minute video:

The platform is packed with time-saving features, like the new Auto-Translate, which enables users to translate any course content into one of 75 different languages with the click of a button, and several features designed to simplify working on large-scale projects.

Ease of use

Authoring with Elucidat is as straightforward as you need it to be. For super easy content creation, the Learning Accelerator offers a library of professional templates that you can select and populate, for instance, to create a game or case study. Each template comes with a downloadable storyboard, a live example, and in-line guidance, reducing the time it takes to plan and design your pages. 

With an upfront diagnostic quiz available to recommend a template for you; getting started is easy.

If you want to build more bespoke courses, you can simply upload your brand elements and then combine and customize our 25+ pre-built interactions, allowing you to create totally unique learning experiences customized to your brand. You can save your creations and use them to build your own library of page types for you and your colleagues to reuse later.

Elucidat makes it easy to work on multiple courses at once; Your teams can use the Variations feature to work on and update multiple courses at once. With this workflow, when you make changes to a “Parent Course” (for instance, to the background color), these changes will be inherited by its Variations. This way, authors benefit from speedy workflows and consistent outputs – even when there’s a surplus of courses on the go.

Whatever approach to content creation your team takes, authoring will be simple and intuitive. Elucidat uses a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) interface, which means you can see how your final course will look throughout the building process. Plus, the content you create is fully responsive and will be automatically optimized for all devices. 

Quality output

With Elucidat, you can create all the essential elearning interactions you’re used to seeing, such as hot graphics and accordions. But the tool also offers contemporary functionality — you can produce interactive videos, host social polls, and create games with points and badges.

You can put your learner at the center by offering personalized learning experiences. For instance, you can embed a role selector or diagnostic quiz at the start of your course, to serve content relevant to each learner. Or you might include clips, where learners input their thoughts to be played back later in the course, to empower them to take a more active part in their learning journey. 

Content can be displayed in a traditional, click-next-to-continue format, as scrolling webpages, or involve complex branching where the learner can choose their pathway through the course. 

With all these options available, your authors can finetune their design according to their audience and subject matter without being restricted to traditional elearning formats.

All Elucidat courses are underpinned by the analytics dashboard, which gives you plenty of data to see what’s working well and where you could make changes.

Production speed

Elucidat’s WYSIWYG interface lets you see all your changes as you make them, speeding up content production. And for a super speedy building process, the Learning Accelerator allows you to create courses 4x faster than ever before.

Because Elucidat is cloud-based, it takes just seconds to share your course. You can invite reviewers to add feedback directly to content within the platform, where it can be easily actioned. And if needed, several authors can work on the same project at the same time.

Once your team is finished working on the content, publishing, and re-publishing can be done with the click of a button, without the need for uploads or downloads. 

Scalability

Elucidat makes setting up your on-brand style and formatting preferences easy. Then you can re-use them across projects. 

Taking this one step further, you can set up your content creators with Guided Authoring. This feature allows you to create custom, on-brand templates for your wider team, including embedded design tips for them to view as they build. This will enable you to open up your production teams without compromising quality. And because the Elucidat interface is currently available in ten languages, you can involve authors from all over the world.

See an example of how Elucidat has been used to involve novice authors across a business here.

Managing large teams is simplified with Advanced User Management. This allows you to customize the User Roles you assign to authors and reviewers, giving you a greater level of control, and reducing the risk of involving new colleagues.

Cloud-based authoring also means you can update your courses through one central dashboard and make mass updates to assets across multiple courses, ensuring consistency from one course to the next. 

Who it’s best suited to

Elucidat is ideally placed to help content authors who need to create impactful elearning as part of a team and roll it out to large numbers of learners.  

Main pros and cons of Elucidat

Pros	Cons
Super easy to build courses optimized for all devices. Cloud-based authoring simplifies collaboration. Packed with features to simplify working at scale, including Variations Manager and Guided Authoring.  Fast authoring, publishing, and updates. Instant translation into 75 languages.  Lots of opportunities for gamification and personalized learning. Built-in data analytics.	Pricing model is designed primarily for organizations working at scale.  The full range of design features can take time to master.

iSpring review

What is iSpring?

iSpring Suite is an easy-to-use, desktop-based authoring tool that integrates with PowerPoint. It’s owned by a US-based company iSpring Solutions, which also offers the LMS, iSpring Learn.

Ease of use

iSpring Suite builds into the PowerPoint application and offers pre-designed templates to simplify the authoring process. It also allows you to populate your courses quickly by selecting from thousands of character and location images from the inbuilt Content Library, as well as creating AI-generated voiceover from right within the tool. 

However, users unfamiliar with PowerPoint may take a while to learn the ropes. There are also a few technical hurdles; The tool is optimized for use on PC rather than Mac and requires a PowerPoint for desktop subscription, as well as adequate local disk space for installation.

Quality output

The overall look of an iSpring course will be familiar to PowerPoint users. It’s simple and professional – albeit with that recognizable slide deck feel.

iSpring offers authors a good range of design possibilities. There are 14 interaction types and 14 question types to choose from. It also provides the opportunity for you to record your voice and screen activity, so you can create walkthrough videos and screencasts. 

One type of interaction iSpring Suite is known for is its interactive role-play feature. You can easily build branching scenarios where the learner interacts with a virtual character by answering questions that determine how that character responds. This is a handy feature for getting your learners to put their knowledge into practice, particularly for things like customer service scenarios.

Production speed

It’s quick and easy for seasoned PowerPoint users to set up pages in iSpring, and the inclusion of the Content Library means you can add assets without leaving the application.

However, production is slowed down by the fact you need to use the preview feature to see how your finished course will look. Also, whilst content, buttons, and controls will adapt to any screen size, they will not be automatically optimized for mobile users. Authors will instead need to make manual edits to each course to deliver the best possible mobile experience. 

Because content is built locally, sharing, reviewing, and publishing courses requires patience. For instance, to share with reviewers, you need to upload your course to the cloud by signing into your iSpring account and exporting it as an HTML file. 

If you want to avoid the issues with desktop-based authoring, your team could use iSpring Page to build micro-courses within your browser, though this only allows you to create articles and simple quizzes.

To translate your courses into different languages, you’ll also need to export your content as a document, translate it elsewhere, and re-import it.

Scalability

iSpring Suite is a handy tool if you have lots of PowerPoint files within your organization that need to be converted into elearning quickly. However, overall the tool is not ideal for working at scale.

Because it is desktop-based, your organization’s branding and assets cannot be saved across courses. There’s also no option to set up and share custom-made templates with colleagues, or use Parent and Child courses to make mass updates to content. And, of course, working at scale is slowed down further by the clunky publishing and review process.

The iSpring Suite interface is available in seven languages currently and doesn’t yet provide an Auto-Translate feature.

Who it’s best suited for

Small organizations or solo workers with PC and PowerPoint access, who might not have the time or budget to build bespoke courses. 

Main pros and cons of iSpring

Pros	Cons
Quickly converts PowerPoint files into basic elearning. Prices work out well for small groups of users.  Ideal for interactive role-play scenarios. Capabilities for creating simple audio and video. Inbuilt Content Library.	Steep learning curve for inexperienced PowerPoint users. Courses have a dated look and feel. Clunky collaboration and reviews. Slow content updates. Not optimized for Mac users.

Summary – is Elucidat a good alternative to iSpring?

Elucidat is the best iSpring alternative, because it can produce better quality content, offering greater creative freedom and more contemporary learning experiences optimized for all devices. You can reach learners with the content they need, when they need it, and where they need it.

Working at scale is also a much smoother process; Because Elucidat is entirely cloud-based, content can be updated instantly, while Guided Authoring, Variations Manager, and Advanced User Management allow you to expand your content creation in a controlled way. 

Finally, your workflows are much faster with Elucidat. By way of cloud-based collaboration capabilities, the Learning Accelerator, and Auto-Translate, your organization can speed up and produce more without increasing costs or reducing impact.

How Elucidat shapes up against other tools:

• 12 Popular Elearning Authoring Tools: A review of some of the best elearning authoring tools against quality of output, speed and efficiency, and scaling up of elearning production.
• Storyline & Captivate: An evaluation on how Elucidat stacks up against Articulate Storyline 360 and Adobe Captivate.
• Evolve: A side-by-side comparison of Elucidat and the cloud-based authoring tool Evolve. 
• Storyline & Rise: A comparison of Elucidat against Articulate 360’s two authoring tools. 
• Gomo Learning: A comparative review of Gomo Learning and Elucidat.
• Lectora Online: A review of how Elucidat compares to cloud-based authoring tool Lectora Online.

Explore Elucidat 

To explore the benefits of Elucidat for yourself, book a personalized demo with one of the team, and start a free trial.

Learning and development (L&D) is critical to the success of any organization. If you’re going to stay competitive and grow your business, your employees need the right knowledge and skills. But finding an effective way to achieve this at speed and scale isn’t easy, hence, there is an increasing need for bespoke elearning providers. Read on to find out how corporate elearning solutions can help.

What are corporate elearning solutions?

Before diving into why corporate elearning solutions should be part of your L&D strategy, let’s get clear on what we mean. Corporate elearning solutions are digital training programs that provide employees with online learning and development opportunities. These programs aim to equip employees with the knowledge and skills to excel at work and contribute to the success of the business.

A corporate elearning solution can include a wide variety of digital assets – from simple pdf checklists and selfie videos to more complex interactive webinars and online courses. These digital formats can be mixed and matched to meet the learning objectives of the program. They can also integrate with face-to-face learning formats, such as instructor-led training, mentoring, and on-the-job coaching.

Why you should opt for corporate elearning solutions

Corporate training can come in a variety of shapes and sizes. So, why would you opt for an elearning solution rather than more traditional face-to-face corporate learning formats?

Reasons for business giants

Larger businesses have more complex processes, a wider range of skills requirements and a bigger workforce. Their employees are often located across regions and countries. Working at this large, global scale means keeping up with changing markets, employee needs, and a variety of laws and regulations. And all while providing the consistently great products and services that customers expect.

In this context, training needs to work at speed and scale. Although L&D resources may be less limited than in smaller organizations, they need to achieve a lot. Corporate elearning programs provide a cost-effective, flexible approach to delivering consistent and relevant learning experiences.

Reasons for small businesses

Smaller organizations have less employees and often take on multiple roles and a wide variety of tasks. This means limited L&D budgets need to go even further towards effectively training their employees.

Mentoring from more experienced employees is a great way to upskill staff. But what happens when those experienced colleagues move on? By developing online learning in-house, smaller enterprises can ensure their business’ expertise is captured and critical skill gaps are avoided.

Benefits of corporate elearning solutions

Whether you’re a larger organization or a smaller enterprise, embracing digital learning can help your business succeed.

Here are our top 5 benefits of developing corporate elearning solutions:

1. Responsive: 87% of businesses expect to face skill gaps within a few years. By developing elearning solutions inhouse with an authoring tool, you can respond as and when new employee development needs appear.
2. Convenient: Employees can log on and complete digital learning at their own pace – wherever and whenever, including on their mobile devices. Easy to fit around other work, digital learning reduces the time employees spend away from their everyday duties for training.
3. Cost-effective: Developing elearning solutions will pay off. It reduces your need for more expensive face-to-face courses, so you can use them where they have most impact. And, when elearning is effective (more on this later), every minute an employee spends training is time well-spent.
4. Empowering: Online training makes it easier for employees to take responsibility for their own development. Providing a range of online training means they can personalize their learning experience. If an employee feels that they have a skill gap, they can identify, access, and complete elearning as and when they feel they need it.
5. Managed and monitored: With a Learning Management Systems (LMS), you can easily manage and monitor the roll out of elearning to large numbers of employees. This can be achieved across locations, sectors and departments, all in real time. This means you can continually improve your performance.

How to deliver effective corporate training

It’s clear that digital learning can deliver plenty of benefits. However, with 43% of L&D professionals struggling to respond at speed, while maintaining quality, this isn’t always happening.

So, how do you deliver effective elearning that meets your end users’ needs and business goals?

Here are 4 key principles for impactful digital learning solutions.

1. Make it relevant

The purpose of training is to help people do their jobs better. So, it’s not surprising that 62% of learners say relevant content is most important when it comes to effective elearning.

If something is useful, people will want to use it. That’s why it’s crucial to move away from generic learning materials and shift to content that meets your employee’s development needs.

2. Get truly interactive

From targets to deadlines, lots of things are vying for your workforce’s attention. If learning is going to be effective, you need to grab their interest and keep it.

With 20% of learners switching off when elearning lacks interactivity, people clearly want more than just an online manual to read. When you take a closer look at what they mean by interactivity, it isn’t about clicking on the screen. It’s about engaging learners by creating connections and active participation. Using blended learning is also a great way to keep your employees engaged.

3. Keep it concise

As well as being easier for busy employees to fit around their schedules, bite-sized digital learning content has more impact. 17% of learners said they were more engaged when elearning was concise, easy to understand, and well-organized. Whether that’s in 2 or 10 minutes, solutions that deliver real impact are a good use of learners’ time.

4. Ensure it’s easy to access

The vast majority of people prefer learning on the job where they can immediately apply it. 22% of learners said their engagement increased when elearning was easy to access at work. Learning needs to be easy to complete and apply in those moments of need. That means making it practical – learning through observing, reflecting and trying.

You can find out more about how you can deliver effective digital learning, in our ultimate guide to designing quality elearning.

Choosing the best corporate elearning solution for you

Although there are some key principles for creating effective elearning solutions, there isn’t just one way to approach it. And there’s certainly no shortage of great tools and technology that can help you deliver it.

With such a wide range of options to choose from, where should you start?

Here are five steps to help you identify the best elearning solutions for your business.

Step 1: Understand your business’ requirements

The current learning trend or latest tech might sound exciting, but is it really right for your business? Before you get carried away with a potential solution, it’s always worth taking the time to get clear on your key requirements.

Here are some things to consider:

• Audience: Think about your learners and the type of training you need to deliver. For example, what are your key learning objectives? Do you need onboarding, compliance or soft skills training?
• Scale: Consider the quantity of the digital learning content you’re aiming to produce in a given time-frame. Will you need to re-brand, re-version, translate and/or regularly update content?
• Team: Reflect on the skill, experience and availability of your team. How ready and able are they to deliver the learning approaches you’re considering? Will you need to upskill your team? Or do you need to bring in new skills and resources from outside your organization (e.g. contractors and agencies)?
• Budget: You’re likely to have a set budget, but what does it look like to use that budget well? There isn’t just one way to think about providing value for money or return on investment (ROI). Identify the data you hold and how you can use it to show the impact of a new corporate elearning solution.

Step 2: Focus on important features

Based on your understanding of your organization’s training needs, you can define your preferred learning methodologies. We have got your covered if you need ideas for your business compliance training.

Next, identify the priority features you would need to deliver these approaches using an elearning platform or authoring tool. For example, is your focus going to be ease of use or custom functionality? Will you make use of templates and ready-made projects or start from scratch? Are you looking to create great mobile learning or is the desktop learning experience more important for your employees?

Step 3: Evaluate each tool

Do some high-level research to identify tools that appear to meet your specific needs. Evaluate each of these. Create a short list of the learning platforms that you think could work for your organization and your chosen learning approaches.

Next, dig a little deeper and see what people are saying about these tools:

• Reviews: Trusted sites, like eLearning Industry, provide unbiased reviews of tools on the market.
• Comparisons: Standalone reviews are helpful, but what if you’ve narrowed things down to a few tools. Comparison articles are a great way to directly compare platforms.
• Testimonials: Most authoring tool websites will include customer testimonials. These will cover their experience of the tool and partnering with the vendor.

Go deeper still and explore the people and services behind the tools. Ask for a demo so you can see authoring tools in action. Ask lots of questions of the customer success or support contact who is demoing the tool. Sign up for free trials so you can try the tools for yourself.

Step 4: Choosing your tool(s)

Finally, it’s time to do a comparison. If you’ve got two or three platforms that meet the same needs, take another look at those reviews. Weigh up the value for money and ROI they could offer.

Share your decision with colleagues and stakeholders for feedback on your decision.

The best corporate elearning solutions providers to choose from

Before making a decision, it’s important to understand all your options and review any possible candidates. So, here’s an overview of some of the best platforms designed to create, host, and/or deliver digital training courses and other learning materials.

Tools for creating elearning content

Elearning authoring tools are pieces of training and development software that enable the creation of digital learning content. Here are 12 top corporate elearning tools you could consider:

1. Elucidat – Helps you create engaging and personalized learning content by unlocking expertise from any employee.
2. Adobe Captivate – Gives experienced authors the power to create high-quality content.
3. Articulate Storyline 360 – Ideal for individual users who prefer PowerPoint, with an added layer of customization.
4. Articulate Rise 360 – Users with access to Articulate 360 can produce simple elearning courses fairly quickly.
5. Gomo – Best for experienced instructional designers that aren’t looking for advanced customization.
6. Lectora – Gives traditional, capable authors an effective tool for producing HTML5 content.
7. Adapt – Designed for technical authors who are looking to design bespoke HTML5 authoring through back-end design.
8. DominKnow – Perfect for teams whose focus is on responsive screen capture and software simulation.
9. Easygenerator – Authoring software designed for learning teams who need to create elearning content, easily.
10. iSpring Suite – Desktop PowerPoint-based tool that’s a great option for novice learning designers who don’t have to worry about updating content regularly.
11. Evolve – Built for teams who need to collaborate together and don’t mind putting in the time to learn how to use it.
12. Camtasia – Video editing suite most commonly used for screen recordings, tutorials or product demos.

Want to take a deeper dive into these tools? Read our full elearning authoring tool reviews.

Platforms for delivering corporate elearning solutions

Once you’ve created your elearning content, you need to deliver it to your employees. There are three types of elearning platforms that can help you do this:

• Learning Management Systems (LMSs)
• Learning Content Management Systems (LCMSs)
• Learning Experience Platforms (LXPs)

Learning Management System (LMS)

A corporate LMS allows you to host, deliver and track digital learning, alongside other learning experiences.

Top examples:

• LearnUpon – A customer-centric learning management tool with an easy-to-use interface.
• Docebo – An LMS platform combining innovative tech and methods to support different learning styles.

Learning Content Management System (LCMS)

An LCMS is a one-stop-shop for creating, hosting, managing, and delivering content. It combines the functions of an LMS with those of a content management system (CMS).

Top examples:

• EdApp – An all-in-one corporate training solution and LCMS that includes a creator tool, admin and learning portal, analytics suite, and editable course library.
• Xyleme – A comprehensive elearning platform and LCMS bringing the elearning content development and management lifecycle together in a streamlined process.

Learning Experience Platform (LXP)

An LXP hosts training content for learners but, instead of L&D teams assigning content, the learner selects and accesses content by discovering it for themselves.

Top example:

• Valamis – An elearning platform and LXP that provides end-to-end elearning capabilities for learning creation, management and delivery.

Want to find out more about these elearning platforms? Read our full online elearning SCORM-compliant platform review.

Summary

Your employees are your biggest and most valuable business expense. Leaving their skills development to chance makes your organization vulnerable. An effective L&D strategy, which includes corporate learning solutions, is critical. From empowering your people to increasing your speed to train, the benefits of these digital solutions are many. But if you’re going to maximize your impact, you need the right learning approaches and tools for your organization.

Using Elucidat for your employee training

Elucidat’s powerful authoring platform empowers new and experienced authors to create impactful elearning. As a multi-award winning authoring tool, Elucidat makes it easier for you to deliver digital learning at scale, helping your business to respond to change faster.

If you’re interested in how Elucidat can help you produce and deliver high impact learning experiences affordably and at scale, book a personalized online demo to get started with a free trial.

Articulate Storyline 360 and Adobe Captivate are both strong candidates when it comes to choosing an elearning tool. Each offers an assortment of features that can be cherry picked to create interactive, high-impact courses. But if you’re weighing up which — if either — of these desktop-based tools will land best with your teams, you might find yourself asking whether a cloud-based alternative will be better suited to your authors and your business. Read on to see how you might answer this, and how Elucidat stacks up.

Why choose one authoring tool over another?

First of all, there are certain base-level expectations any authoring tool should meet. Storyline 360, Captivate, and Elucidat tick all these boxes. All three can all be used to create SCORM-compliant elearning content, provide experiences for multi-device learners, and support a broad range of learning interactions, multi-media content, assessments, and course variations. In other words, in the right hands, they all generate great results.

However, it’s important to consider some of the outside factors that contribute to the way in which your teams use an authoring platform, including:

• The type of content you want to create (e.g., whether systems training or compliance training).
• Your content development workflow (who is involved across the department or organization).
• What experience and technical capabilities your authors have with using tools like these.
• How much time you have to get your courses up and running. 
• The amount of elearning content that your teams need to produce and manage.
• Whether you will need to update your courses regularly. 
• Your available budget.
• Whether you need to translate content into multiple languages.
• Elucidat, Articulate Storyline 360, and Adobe Captivate 
• Before we dive into the pros and cons of these tools, here’s an overview of the main differences.

Save hours comparing authoring tools by downloading this handy template. We’ve completed the Elucidat column for you!

The pros & cons of Articulate Storyline 360

Storyline 360, part of the Articulate 360 package, is a desktop authoring software known for its vast capabilities in creating bespoke content. 

Pros 

• For advanced authors, Storyline 360 can be really powerful, offering an extensive authoring toolkit and endless opportunities to innovate. 
• Articulate 360 comes with a suite of other tools, including Rise 360, which supports a more simplistic approach to learning design, and Content Library 360, an in-application library of royalty-free video and images.
• Storyline 360 offers features that make it effective for creating systems training.

Cons

• Courses built in Storyline 360 will be resized for tablet and smartphone users, but some of the features will not be optimized for these devices, which may compromise the learning experience. 
• Utilizing the most engaging features requires a big learning curve and a time investment that some organizations are not able to support. 
• Collaboration is slowed down by the fact Storyline 360 does not support cloud-based authoring and reviews.  
• Course updates and Quality Assurance checks are slower to implement than with cloud-based alternatives. 
• Translations can be time consuming and aren’t automated.

The pros & cons of Adobe Captivate

Captivate is a desktop elearning application that’s known for its advanced authoring capabilities, particularly in creating simulations and systems training.  

Pros 

• It’s quite easy to get started building basic courses in Captivate. You can convert an existing PowerPoint presentation into a video and simply overlay interactions. Alternatively, you can use Quick Start Projects to select a set of ready-to-go, customizable slide templates.
• You can create screen capture videos that can be used for systems training, as well as upload your 360 images and videos to create immersive environments for use with VR headsets.
• There are a range of different features that allow you to create responsive courses, though this can be a bit of a clunky process. 
• The integrated Asset Store offers free-to-use images, characters, themes, games, video, and more.

Cons

• Courses created in Captivate can feel quite similar to one another, and might seem a little dated, as they are restricted to a click-next-to-continue format and have some visual semblance to PowerPoint files.
• As a desktop application, collaboration between authors can be hard to manage.
• Maintenance and updates can be cumbersome. 
• There’s no data collection or analytics built into the tool, which means measuring the success of your courses has to completely rely on your LMS capabilities.
• The tool has quite a complex user interface and it can be difficult to perform certain tasks. Making your content fully responsive, for instance, can eat into production time.   

Why would you want an alternative to Articulate Storyline 360 and Adobe Captivate?

It’s possible to create some really high-end elearning content using the Adobe or Articulate software. But we are regularly approached by Learning Managers and Designers in search of a solution to the challenges they experience using an offline desktop-based tool that’s not built for collaborative production. Businesses are increasingly looking for:

• A user experience that supports both novice authors and experts 
• Streamlined workflows for teams, with straightforward review capabilities and permissions 
• Automatic translation to reduce agency cost, whilst increasing speed of production.
• Easier ways to update and re-release individual elearning courses, as well as faster ways to update branding and assets at scale 
• Mobile responsiveness without additional effort 
• Data and insight into engagement with learning content
• Access to support and consultancy services 

How is Elucidat a good alternative?

Elucidat is an elearning authoring platform that uses the cloud, enabling authoring teams to work smarter and increase productivity. With a range of features designed to simplify the authoring process, authors can work more easily and at scale, whilst also having access to a vast and flexible design toolkit. 

Get to know Elucidat in this quick 3-minute video:

Speeding up production

Elucidat caters for both amateur authors and experts. Ready-made templates feature offers a library of professional templates for you to select and populate, allowing total novices to jump straight into development and produce training 4x faster than ever before. A diagnostic series of questions will even help recommend the best templates for you.

If you want to create something more bespoke, simply upload your brand elements, then combine and customize our 25+ pre-built interactions to create unique learning experiences. You can save your creations and use them to build your own library of page types, for you and your colleagues to re-use later. 

Once your course is ready for review, cloud-based authoring means you can invite anyone to add comments directly to content within the platform. This feedback is stored in a consolidated way, making it easy for your team to view and action.

When you’re done creating your course, you can release it to your learning management system (LMS) seamlessly or create an online link to share with your learners.

Creating engaging learning experiences

As well as staple interactions like quiz questions, drag and drop activities, and interactive hotspots, Elucidat also allows you to create interactive personalized content and “branching” scenarios.  What’s more, cloud-based hosting means you have the added option of creating social polls; get people talking by asking your learners a question and showing them how their answer compares to their peers’.

Responsive design is fully supported and easy to implement. The Device View Slider shows how your content will look on any screen size, so you can easily hide, show, resize, or reposition assets for different devices. 

Whatever interactions you decide to use, Elucidat courses can be designed to look and feel as contemporary as you like. Pages can be paginated in a traditional, click-next-to-continue format or you can display your content down scrolling pages. And without being restricted to grids or columns, you can position your assets however you want.

Continuous improvement is underpinned by data analytics, inbuilt into the tool itself. For instance, Trends allows you to see general indicators about how a course is performing, whilst How your questions were answered allows you to see how specific pages are being answered.

Capturing expertise

With Learning Accelerator simplifying production, L&D teams can involve their subject matter experts in course creation, without the learning curve or time needed for training. You can also set them up for authoring success by utilizing Company Templates which offers them pre-defined company templates built by you to meet your standards and review workflows. This enables you to open up your team of content creators and capture expertise from a wider cross section of your organization.

Explore this example of how this feature allowed cloud banking group, nCino, to open up their elearning production. 

Delivering on-brand, multi-language content and easily updating at scale 

The advantages of using a cloud-based tool really come into play when creating courses at scale. For a start, Elucidat makes it easy to set up your on-brand style and then re-use it across projects.

Unlike desktop-based applications, with Elucidat, you can also control and update all your online courses through one central dashboard. It includes access to a centralized Asset Library, through which you can build your media repository and make mass updates to images and videos across projects.

What’s more, Advanced User Management allows you to customize the User Roles you assign reviewers, allowing your teams to work to their strengths and giving you a greater level of control when working at scale.

General maintenance time is minimized. You can make edits and release courses instantly without having to re-upload your courses to the LMS (which can be painstaking when you just want to correct a typo!) 

Elucidat also allows you to reach more learners with its translation capabilities. You can use Auto-Translate to translate your content into one of 75 different languages, and Variations Manager to manage your localized versions, saving you the hassle of making updates to things like branding and assets, on each individual course.

Utilizing Learning Consultancy services

A wide range of targeted coaching and consultancy services  empower you to use Elucidat to deliver your training strategy. From upskilling your team with best practice workshops, to helping them design tailored templates, and reviewing their finished courses, we will be with you every step of the way. 

Test out the best alternative to Articulate Storyline 360 and Adobe Captivate

If you want an authoring platform that will help you deliver real-life impact for learners and your business, then it’s worth exploring Elucidat further with a free personalized demo.

Storyline 360, Rise 360, and Elucidat remain three of the most popular elearning authoring tools on the market. All three let content authors create great-looking online courses, but there are some differences in how they work and what they can offer. Let’s see how they compare.

How will we compare the three authoring tools?

We will be reviewing each tool from five angles:

• Ease of use
• Quality output
• Production speed
• Scalability
• Who it’s best suited to

Same time comparing tools with this handy authoring tool comparison template. We’ve filled out the Elucidat column to get you started.

Elucidat review

What is Elucidat?

Elucidat is a multi-award winning elearning authoring tool designed to help high-output teams create quality online training at scale. By streamlining the content creation process, Elucidat empowers internal experts to produce engaging, consistent, and branded learning experiences faster and more cost-effectively.

Get to know Elucidat in this quick 3-minute video:

Ease of use

There are different options for building content in Elucidat: you might choose to use best-practice templates, which come with downloadable storyboards and in-line design guidance. Alternatively, you can create your own company templates to provide custom, on-brand templates for your team to use.

Whichever you choose, you’ll have access to Elucidat’s industry-leading Customer Success team. 

And because Elucidat uses a what-you-see-is-what-you-get interface and supports responsive authoring, you can see exactly how your course is going to look as you build it, and on any device.

Production speed

Elucidat allows you to add, duplicate, and move pages within your project quickly and easily. For an extra swift turnaround, using ready-made templates means you can create and publish courses four times faster than before. 

Collaboration between team members is seamless. With cloud-based authoring, you can invite anyone to your projects to review and add comments directly to content within the platform.  

Maintenance time is also minimized, as any updates you need to make on your live courses can be actioned without reuploading the SCORM files.

Scalability

Learning & Development teams can involve their subject matter experts (SMEs) in course creation, without requiring training, meaning higher production rates. To maximize efficiency when working at scale, Elucidat makes it easy to set up your brand and then reuse it across projects. 

Elucidat supports global scaling up with a powerful translation tool. It makes it easy to create and manage multilingual versions of your courses with Auto-Translate, with consistent terminology thanks to a custom glossary. You can even house all language variations within a single SCORM file for a seamless learner experience, and roll out updates across all versions with just a few clicks.

Managing assets across your courses is simple; the centralized asset library allows you to build your media repository as you go, so you can easily reuse videos and images later on. Even better, you can instantly update the same asset used across 100s of courses with mass updates.

What’s more, when it comes to collaboration, Advanced User Management allows you to customize the default user roles and even create your own, allowing your teams to work to their strengths and giving you complete control when managing collaboration across courses.

Who it’s best suited to

Elucidat is ideally placed to help content authors who need to create elearning as part of a global team and roll it out to large numbers of learners.

Main pros and cons of Elucidat

Pros	Cons
Cloud-based authoring makes it ideal for working at scale.	The pricing model is designed primarily for organizations working at scale.
Packed with time-saving features to reduce production and maintenance costs.	The full range of design features can take time to master.
Super easy to use.
Allows SMEs and novice authors to get involved, allowing customers to expand their production capacity and scale.
Easily manage localized versions and updates with localized translations.

Storyline 360 review

What is Storyline 360?

Storyline 360* is a desktop tool that uses a PowerPoint-style slide-based approach to elearning development. It’s purchased as part of the Articulate 360 suite.

*Note that Storyline 3, which was previously offered as a standalone version of Storyline, is no longer receiving updates from Articulate. Customers must use Storyline as part of the Articulate 360 suite to access ongoing product updates.

Ease of use

Creating a very basic course in Storyline 360 will be easy for many authors, particularly those familiar with its PowerPoint foundations. Slide templates selected from the inbuilt Content Library 360 are a simple way to get started.

However, Storyline’s most interesting features are more complex to create. Also, while the responsive player ensures content is resized for mobile devices, the experience won’t be optimized for these users; it will simply be shrunk down to fit the screen.

Quality output

Pretty much any type of interaction can be created in Storyline 360; it’s just about taking the time to learn the ropes. What’s more, the tool allows you to create screencasts, software simulations, and animation effects. 

Production speed

Creating courses is likely to require a time investment while authors get accustomed to the tool. Also, because Storyline 360 is not cloud-based, authors can’t work on courses at the same time.

Storyline 360 users can benefit from the embedded Content Library 360, which means you can source generic royalty-free images without leaving the tool.

Scalability

The Slide Masters feature allows you to create various layouts and assign them to slides with certain types of content, supporting the development of large projects.

However, working at scale can be hindered by the steep learning curve that authors need to master, and the fact that updates and collaboration aren’t supported by the cloud, which can slow down production and increase room for error.

Who it’s best suited to

Articulate Storyline is a good option for content authors who want custom interactions and have the time to invest in creating these from scratch.

Pros	Cons
Can be used to create any interaction.	The most engaging features take time to create.
Content is very customizable.	Collaboration and content updates can be time-consuming.
Can create systems training.	Courses are not adaptive. They just shrink down for different devices.

Rise 360 review

Rise 360, also part of Articulate 360, is a web-based authoring tool that lets novice authors build basic courses using a range of pre-built “blocks.”

Ease of use

Basic authoring in Rise 360 is easy. You can apply prebuilt and customizable course themes and then add, edit, and drag-and-drop block templates to build your training. When you’re done, you can preview your lessons or courses to see how they will look on a desktop, tablet, or mobile device.

However, the interface is not available in multiple languages, meaning all authors and reviewers need to be English-speaking.

Quality output

Courses with Rise 360 are clean, clear, and simple. The tool offers a decent range of standard interactions, including interactive sorting, timelines, flashcards, quizzes, and scenario blocks, that fit the bill for some elearning courses.

However, there is very little flexibility beyond these, and limited scope for tailoring page layouts. This means it’s harder to fully customize a course to meet specific needs, and the learning experience from one course to another can start to feel quite similar. A way around this is to publish a Storyline 360 project to Articulate 360, then import it into a Rise 360 blocks lesson, but this results in a disjointed learner experience.

Production speed

The speed and efficiency of creating courses with Articulate Rise is its main selling point. You can use simple block templates to build your course quickly and access the built-in Content Library 360 to select and embed generic assets.

Scalability

Courses built in Rise can be cloned and reused, so a standard design setup can be used for multiple courses. Also, unlike Storyline 360, Articulate Rise is a cloud-based tool, so multiple content authors can work on the same course at the same time.

The main drawback of using Rise 360 to create courses at scale is that the learning experiences may start to feel quite repetitive to your audience.

Who it’s best suited for

Given its easy-to-use interface and cloud-based capabilities, Rise 360 is best suited to small organizations looking to turn out courses quickly, without having to spend time learning how to use the tool or managing content uploads and downloads.Given its easy-to-use interface and cloud-based capabilities, Rise 360 is best suited to small organizations looking to turn out courses quickly, without having to spend time learning how to use the tool or managing content uploads and downloads.

Main pros and cons of Rise 360

Pros	Cons
Very easy to use with a quick turnaround.	Limited flexibility over visuals and interactions.
Cloud-based collaboration.	Creates quite generic learning experiences.
Simple learning curve, so good for small companies without dedicated L&D authors.	Geared towards smaller, less experienced teams. Not an enterprise offering.

Elucidat alongside Articulate 

If there isn’t one tool available that does everything the way you need it to, your L&D team might consider multiple subscriptions.

What would you use each tool for?

Elucidat works well for most elearning design needs. Other tools like Storyline 360 can complement an all-around tool like Elucidat for things like systems training or advanced assessments.

How Elucidat covers the Articulate 360 gap

Storyline 360 has the greatest flexibility and scope for creating bespoke interactions. However, it comes with a steep learning curve, and because it’s a desktop tool, working at scale can be challenging. Rise 360, on the other hand, is cloud-based and very simple to use, but this can come at the expense of the learner experience.

Elucidat meets you in the middle, allowing authors to easily create high-quality, wide-ranging learning experiences without time spent learning the ropes.

Final thoughts

Elucidat can be considered a top choice for large organizations looking to scale up their authoring teams and deliver high-quality courses quickly, in response to changing business needs. Elucidat’s powerful translation tools also make it an excellent choice for organizations expanding learning at a global scale.

However, if your L&D teams have complex and multifaceted requirements, you might consider combining Elucidat and Articulate 360 subscriptions to cover all bases.

Explore Elucidat

Find out how you can produce sustainable, scalable elearning with Elucidat. Book a personalized demo with one of the team, and start a free trial.

How does Elucidat compare to Gomo Learning? What makes them similar and what gives each tool its edge? Let’s look at the two authoring tools side by side to help you decide which is right for you.

GoMo vs Elucidat: At-a-glance comparison table

We will be reviewing each tool from five perspectives: ease of use, quality output, production speed, scalability, and who it’s best suited to. But before we dive in, this table gives you a snapshot of both: 

	Elucidat	GoMo Learning
Solution	Cloud-based authoring tool	Cloud-based authoring tool
Digital learning formats	HTML5, Video, SCORM (1.2, 2004), xAPI (TinCan)	HTML5, Video, SCORM, xAPI (TinCan), cmi5
Production speed	Fast	Fast
Easy to use?	Easy	Somewhat
Perfect for	Large employers looking to reduce costs and create high-quality courses quickly and effectively at scale.	Experienced elearning designers who are not looking for too much customization.

Is Elucidat a good alternative to Gomo Learning?

Let’s dive deeper into the differences between Elucidat and GoMo Learning. Starting with Elucidat.

What is Elucidat?

Elucidat is a multi-award winning elearning authoring tool that enables you to produce high-quality online courses at scale. 

Elucidat is designed for teams producing large amounts of elearning content and reaching thousands of employees. Elucidat enables teams to work smarter by streamlining production and empowering anyone to share their expertise and create elearning without increasing costs or reducing content impact.

Ease of use

Elucidat caters for both amateur authors and experts. Novices can simplify their content creation with Templates, a library of professional templates that you can select and populate, for instance, to create a quiz, game, or case study. 

Each template has been compiled by Elucidat’s in-house team of learning designers and will include all the pages and interactions you need for your course — simply populate each page with your own text and imagery, using inline guidance for direction.

Alternatively, if you want more creative control, you can start with a blank project, pull in your brand style, and then combine any of the 25+ pre-built interactions and question types to create unique learning experiences. With the option to save your creations as bespoke company templates, you can share these with your wider team of content creators to support them with their own authoring journey. 

Taking collaborative authoring one step further, Elucidat’s Company Templates workflow enables you to open up your team of content creators to SMEs who might be new to elearning. This feature allows you to ensure authors only use pre-approved company templates that have been set up and configured by your Learning & Development team,  embedding quality and consistency into all your organization’s content. 

See how cloud banking experts, nCino did just that.

Whichever authoring approach you take, because Elucidat uses a what-you-see-is-what-you-get interface, you can see exactly how your course is going to look for learners as you build it. The Device View slider even shows how your content will look on different screen sizes, so you can easily adapt assets for different devices.

Unlike many authoring tools, the Elucidat interface is currently available in nine languages, making it suitable for global workflows. 

Quality output

Elucidat allows visual designers lots of room for creativity. Courses can be organized in a traditional, click-next-to-continue format or displayed in weblike scrolling pages.

The final layout of your pages will adapt to different devices, rather than just re-size, meaning the learning experience doesn’t need to be compromised for mobile users and multiple versions of the same course don’t need to be created. 

Elucidat’s vast authoring toolkit means you can design courses that will grab your learner’s attention – and keep it. As well as staple interactions like quiz questions and drag and drop activities, you can create highly-personalized content. For example, using Clips you can ask learners to input their thoughts or ideas and then play this back to them later, prompting them to reflect on their personal learning journey. 

You also have the option of creating social polls; get people talking by asking your learners a question and showing them how their answer compares to their peers’.

With various options for creating quizzes, adding quirky animation effects, and awarding points or badges to learners, there’s also a lot of scope for gamification. 

Production speed

The simplicity of Elucidat means your course creation process can be as rapid or thorough as you want it to be, and Templates feature means you can create and publish courses four times faster than before. 

Cloud authoring streamlines the review process; invite your reviewers to add comments directly to content even if they don’t have an Elucidat account!

Scalability

Elucidat makes it easy to set up bespoke Brand Styles which can be reused across multiple projects. You also have the option to set up a Parent-Child relationship between Courses which can be globally updated at once.

When it comes to collaborating with your team, Advanced User Management allows you to customize the User Roles for each person in your Elucidat account. Decide whether your users can, for instance, edit your brand styles, delete projects, or upload assets, so you can remove the risks of bringing in a variety of stakeholders from across your business.

Elucidat also allows you to reach more learners with its translation capabilities. You can use Auto-Translate to translate your content into one of 75 different languages.

Who it’s best suited to

Elucidat is best placed for dynamic teams of content creators, who may not all be experienced in learning design but want to create high impact, contemporary elearning at scale.

It’s also a strong contender for globally dispersed teams, whose authors and learners have different language requirements. 

Main pros and cons of Elucidat

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Pros	Cons
Cloud-based authoring makes it ideal for working at scale. Packed with time-saving features.  Templates features allows novice authors to get involved easily. Multi-language authoring and course translation capabilities support global business models. Vast authoring toolkit that supports gamification and personalization. Full flexibility of visual design and layouts.	Pricing model designed primarily for users working at scale. Best for teams of 5+. The full range of design features can take time to master.

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Gomo Learning review

What is Gomo?

Gomo Learning (Gomo) is a cloud-based elearning authoring tool developed by the Learning Technologies Group. Like Elucidat, it’s used to build interactive, multi-device courses. 

Gomo offers three plans to customers – Small, Medium, and Enterprise. Since the Enterprise plan offers the full range of features, it will be the focus of this review.

Ease of use

Like with Elucidat, courses built in Gomo will fully adapt for different devices, without you having to make complicated manual edits, providing the best possible experience for mobile users.

What’s more, Gomo offers authors a simple drag-and-drop interface, so no technical skills are required to get you started. However, the authoring interface isn’t fully what-you-see-is-what-you-get, which makes it harder to visualize what you’re creating.  

There is no option to pull in pre-built course templates, like with Elucidat’s Company Templates. Rather, templates in Gomo are per interaction only, so you will always need to select and combine these to establish your course structure. 

Whilst Gomo does have some handy features to simplify course translations, the actual authoring interface is English-only, which can be a barrier for global authoring teams. 

Quality output

Gomo offers a good range of pre-built interactions and question types, as well as the opportunity to create quizzes and branching scenarios. 

Content delivered in Gomo can be horizontally paginated or sit within scrolling pages. You also have the option to add a parallax effect to your scrolling pages, where, as the learner scrolls down a page, the background images move slower than foreground images, adding a dynamic feel to the learning experience.

One drawback to designing in Gomo is that layouts must follow the two, three or four column structure, which may feel restrictive to more visionary designers. 

Production speed

Like Elucidat, Gomo authoring tool is accessed via a web browser, which means collaboration between authors is seamless. There’s also no software to download and you can make updates to live courses instantly. 

Another time-saving feature is Course Wizard, which enables you to set up a course in three simple steps. This includes selecting your course theme, which will apply a pre-defined look and feel to your content. 

Scalability

Gomo offers great collaboration capabilities, including the Task Management feature, which allows you to assign users tasks and track their completion. And as with Elucidat, because Gomo is cloud-based, multiple people can log in to work on the same course at once. However, permission settings can only be allocated depending on whether the user is an administrator, editor, or reviewer. 

Working at scale is simplified by the use of course variables, a centralized asset library, and the ability to easily set up and apply course branding across projects. But one of Gomo’s main strengths is its multi-language options, meaning different language versions of the same course can be managed from the same place. 

The main drawback for working at scale with Gomo, is that there are storage limits, so the more content you have, the more it will cost your organization to host. 

Who it’s best suited for

Gomo Learning is designed for organizations who want to deliver really engaging, multi-device courses. 

The Enterprise plan is geared towards L&D teams creating content for a global audience and is best suited to authors who have a good amount of time to invest in building. 

Pros and cons

Pros	Cons
Cloud-based authoring allows for simple collaboration and updates. Vast authoring toolkit. Quick to create basic courses.  Courses are fully responsive and adaptive.	No WYSIWYG interface, which can make visualizing your course harder, slowing down the production process . Storage limits. No course templates to start from. Single language interface for authors.

Why choose one over the other?

Elucidat and Gomo are both really smart, cloud-based authoring tools, suitable for global teams of authors who want to create multi-device elearning.

Gomo is suitable for organizations who want to create traditional content with a pre-defined learning journey. Authors can create content relatively straightforwardly and ensure their learners have a consistent and predictable experience. 

Elucidat is more valuable for enterprise customers looking to turn out high-impact courses quickly, cost-effectively and at scale. Courses built in Elucidat make use of personalized, gamified and social elements, making it a strong contender for organizations who want to easily recreate content that’s memorable and will inspire conversations outside of the training session.

How Elucidat shapes up against other tools

• 12 Popular Elearning Authoring Tools: A review of twelve of the best elearning authoring tools against quality of output, speed and efficiency of authoring, and scaling up of elearning production.
• Storyline & Captivate: An evaluation on how Elucidat stacks up as an alternative to the desktop-based platforms Articulate Storyline 360 and Adobe Captivate.
• Evolve: A side-by-side comparison of Elucidat and the cloud-based authoring tool Evolve. 
• Storyline & Rise: A comparison of Elucidat against Articulate 360’s two authoring tools. 
• iSpring Suite: An exploration as to whether Elucidat can be used as an alternative to the desktop authoring suite iSpring. 
• Lectora Online: A review of how Elucidat compares to cloud-based authoring tool Lectora Online.

Want to find out more?

If you want to find out more about how Elucidat and Gomo compare, start a free trial of Elucidat to see what it can do. We’ll get you off to a great start with a tailored demo.

Co-written by: Lauren Keith, Senior Learning Designer.