The Differences between Adobe Presenter and Adobe Captivate

I read many discussions on Adobe Captivate vs. Adobe Presenter, or Captivate vs. a similar Presenter tool and I'm always puzzled by this question because frankly it's like comparing apples and oranges. 

Admittedly, there are some overlaps between the two applications, like the fact that both applications leverage PowerPoint slides for generating Flash-based eLearning, and both include a similar Quizzing module, but other than that, they were developed to serve two different purposes and each has its own strenghts. 

Perhaps a better question is how do I effectively use both products together?

Adobe Presenter was designed to enable PowerPoint users to easily generate Flash-based eLearning courses, by adding voice-over to slides, and syncing the audio to the slide animations. It also has features for importing or capturing video using a webcam, as well as using the built-in Quizzes to include graded quizzes or surveys in your final project.

There are two things that stand out in Adobe Presenter in the way of strengths, when comparing it to Adobe Captivate, namely the sleek, user-friendly navigation user interface (UI) in the final project; and the way it natively works with PowerPoint files, this is because Adobe Presenter works right from within PowerPoint.

Click HERE to see a short Adobe Presenter presentation, where you can experience the sleek navigation UI I mentioned above. Along the way, when you get to slide 3, you'll notice it is an embedded Adobe Captivate simulation, which plays perfectly inside the same interface.

Just to recap, if your requirement is to produce eLearning based mostly on lots of PowerPoint slides, hands down Adobe Presenter is the product you need.

However if you need to create software simulations where you need to record the screen, or need to develop branched scenarios for soft-skills training, which requires complex branching, then Adobe Captivate is exactly what you need to use.

So what if you need to develop eLearning that involves PowerPoint slides and you also need to supplement the project with software simulations or complex branched scenarios created in Adobe Captivate?

This is where the two applications can work closely together.

In this video (00:28:34) I share best practices for inserting Adobe Captivate projects in Adobe Presenter. Click the image below to launch the video in a new window.