Both have their advantages. I view Articulate as rapid development software, Lectora as more advanced. Both import Flash objects.
Some positives re: Articulate:
1. Articulate Presenter is really a PowerPoint plug-in. It's great if you are creating content of sufficient quality, look and feel, etc., within PPT, and the animations and effects within PPT are sufficient. Assuming you have the Articulate suite, you have Question Maker for testing, Engage for interactions (although if you have Flash, that may not be needed).
2. It compresses your audio further to reduce file size. Note: test audio by publishing to verify final output. Especially MP3s, since those are already compressed.
Some negatives re: Articulate:
1. It resizes PPT pages and imported images to fit the Articulate display (720 x 540). This can affect window screen captures. I generally work in PPT at 75% to simulate published size.
2. If you have to correct something, you have to re-publish the entire course.
Some positives re: Lectora:
1. By its nature, much more advanced. Variables, built in testing, etc. I enjoy working in it.
2. Ability to accept information from Flash files.
3. What you see at 100% in Lectora is what you should see published.
4. No further compression of audio files. This can be good or bad - good re: quality, bad re: file size can be large.
5. If you need to just correct one page or imported object, you can just publish what has been updated. Note: if you change the number of pages being tracked by page count, you need to republish all.
