Trying to decide

 I have Lectora, Captivate, Articulate and Camtasia. The reason is that there is not one product on the market that can do everything, but there are combinations that give the greatest value for the investment. Captivate and Camtasia can be incorporated into both Articulate and Lectora and the Articulate Engage animations add a great deal to my Lectora titles when I've used them. 

Each tool has it's strengths and weaknesses and you need to carefully evaluate the need of the project to determine which tool or combination of tools will proivde you with the best result. The trick is to know where the strengths and weaknesses lie. For instance:

Lectora - it's greatest strength is it's ability to integrate all forms of media, page layout is simple and the testing is excellent. Most importantly it can handle variables which gives you the ability to create complex coruses. Where I see it's weaknesses is the audio recorder and screen recorder are weak, it cannot publish to Flash and the learning curve can be a little long.

Articulate - strenght, speed/ease of use. Lacks the ability to use variables and is dependent upon the capabilities of PowerPoint.

Captivate, until verison 4 very limited abilities with variables, timeline is difficult to use, hard to go edit, no cascading controls so you have to build buttons etc for each page. Excellent for creating simulations, and can pass varialbe values back into Lectora

Camtasia- great screen recorder and can be used to create talking head video very quickly with a webcam. No testing capabilities.

If you can convince your mangement to allow the investment in both, I'd go for Articulate and Lectora Publisher. You can get a copy of Jing from TechSmith which is the freeware version of Camtasia and do a search for Wink which is a freeware version of Captivate.

peregrinator said:I'm doing some research to determine if I should purchase Articulate as well as Lectora. If you're familiar with Lectora, you know that it has a lot of cool capabilities, some of which are not possible in Articulate, though perhaps that should be followed by the word "yet." It seems to me that Articulate has a much shorter learning curve and is still more appropriate for certain kinds of presentations and trainings, perhaps even self-paced "train the trainer" presentations. How might I just the purchase of both to my boss or should I bother to get both?