Adobe Captivate

User Satisfaction Index: -3

We asked your opinions on the eLearning authoring tool Adobe Captivate to find out what you think of it. Adobe's Captivate promises a powerful solution for creating e-learning courses. We've reviewed the feedback and as our exclusive "User Satisfaction Meter" indicates, the overall rating of -3 suggests mixed user satisfaction. Many Captivate users noted how powerful and flexible the tool is in authoring e-learning courses. Most of the negative Captivate feedback centered around the difficulty in learning how to use the tool.

If you're a power user with sophisticated e-learning authoring needs and willing to put the effort into coming up the learning curve, Adobe Captivate may be the right tool for you. However, if you're an instructional designer with more modest authoring needs, you might find Adobe Captivate somewhat frustrating and difficult to use.

How They Rate Adobe Captivate

Adobe Captivate received an average overall rating of 7.2 from respondents, where 1 is Hate It and 10 is Love It.  23% of respondents gave Captivate a rating of 6 or less. 47% of respondents gave Captivate a rating or 7 or 8.  20% of respondents gave Captivate a rating of 9 or 10. 

Scale:    1=Hate It!    10=Love It!

What They Like about Adobe Captivate

Overall people liked the software's flexibility and feature set, noting that Captivate allows them to work intuitively "out the box" yet still offers the ability to incorporate more advanced functions as necessary.  Among the comments we received:

"Easy to use. Can add highlights, audio, etc to highlight training points. Captures real key strokes so it's very good for any type of computer training."


"For the most part it lets me create content easily, yet add those more advanced features when I need to."

What They Don't Like about Adobe Captivate

When asked what users didn't like about the software, some had issues with managing the product's extensive list of features and overcoming the initial learning curve.

"The learning curve can be quite steep when you are using the entire eLearning suite of Adobe products. Some of the more complex funtions require programmer knowledge. The help documentation is ok but could be written in a more user friendly manner." 

"Sometimes it takes too many clicks to do something. I always need to look at their help to figure out how to do something basic."

When they Use or Recommend Adobe Captivate

The majority of those who commented said they used Captivate primarily to create software simulations, product demonstrations and internal training purposes.

"I recommend using Captivate when a significant amount of screen captures are involved, particularly for software/systems training"

"...Need to create interactive materials, great for scenario based training. new drag and drop captability is awesome, can do simple training or complex training"

"When you have a lot of data in various forms and need to put together a demo quickly. You can create the learning, encourage interaction of participants; quiz them and score with minimal learning curve"

User Satisfaction Index Calculation

The User Satisfaction Index measures overall user satisfaction based on survey responses. The User Satisfaction Index ranges from -100 to 100, where -100 represents total user dissatisfaction and 100 represents total user satisfaction. A User Satisfaction Index of 0 represents neutral or split user satisfaction. The User Satisfaction Index is calculated by taking the percentage of survey responses with a "9" or "10" and subtracting the percentage of survey responses with a "6" or less.

Let us know what you think about Adobe Captivate