Why Captivate Isn’t Part of the Creative Cloud

This is the third time this week that someone has reached out to me with this question. When this happens I usually write a blog post to answer instead of writing the same email to multiple people explaining my thoughts about this controversial question. This way I can now refer people making similar inquiries to this post rather than repeating myself. Adobe has invited me to participate in things like conferences and training, but I think it’s important to say that I do not know Adobe’s plans for the marketing or selling of Adobe Captivate. When it comes right down to it, I’m just a user like all of you. Everything I say in this blog post is just my thoughts and opinion. There was a time when Adobe offered a product called the Adobe eLearning Suite. In fact, this is how I purchased my first personal copy of Adobe Captivate. The eLearning Suite included the following applications:

• Adobe Captivate

• Adobe Photoshop

• Adobe Dreamweaver

• Adobe Flash

• Adobe Audition

• Adobe Presenter

• Adobe Acrobat Professional

The last time Adobe offered this suite of products was with Adobe Captivate 6.

Since that time, the only other product where Adobe Captivate is bundled with other software from Adobe is in the Adobe Technical Communications Suite. The Adobe Technical Communications Suite includes the following pieces of software:

• Adobe Captivate

• Adobe FrameMaker

• Adobe RoboHelp

• Adobe Captivate (2019 release)

• Adobe Acrobat

• Adobe Presenter 11.1

Of course, many people are always hoping that Captivate will become part of the Creative Cloud. As a Captivate and Creative Cloud user, I completely understand this. For me, the greatest benefit of such a merger would be the ability to install all my Adobe apps from one Creative Cloud application. Imagine purchasing a new PC or Mac and simple logging into your Adobe Account and selecting the option to install all your Adobe software. I could go away and have lunch while everything I need to be creative that afternoon would magically appear on my new PC.

Of course, some of you are hoping for a reduced price. I understand that also. Captivate, and the Creative Cloud represents over $US 80 per month. I would gladly accept a bundled price of less than $80, but I don’t think everyone would agree. Imagine if you were not in the eLearning industry but were a Creative Cloud user. If Adobe asked you to suddenly pay $30 more for something you didn’t need or want, you would likely not accept that. I would imagine that many illustrators, designers, and graphic artists might start looking for alternatives to Creative Cloud.

And for those who think Adobe should absorb Captivate’s cost and include it in the Creative Cloud for free, I say no thanks. If Captivate became a bonus piece of software in the Creative Cloud, I would imagine that it would stop being the innovative software it is today. I’m fairly certain that Adobe would no longer offer new features like interactive video or 360° VR training. As free included software, Captivate would cease to be that innovative product it is today.

The Tools I Use

On a recent live stream, I was asked about which tools I use to create my eLearning and video tutorials. I gave a partial answer during the live stream but I thought I would go a little more in-depth on that question here.

Adobe Captivate

I think it's obvious that I use Adobe Captivate and almost always have the latest version. I do also keep the previous version installed on my main system. Up to and including presently I have always purchased a perpetual license for Adobe Captivate. I know that Adobe would prefer me to tell you to buy the subscription version but I always feel more comfortable knowing that regardless of what my current situation is, I can continue to run my Copy of Captivate indefinitely.

One thing that the viewers of my YouTube tutorials are often surprised to learn is that I also use Adobe Captivate to record my videos. I use the Video Demo feature to record the features that I’m demonstrating on another instance of Captivate that I run simultaneously.

Adobe Creative Cloud

Going back several years I purchased the Adobe eLearning Suite which is no longer available. The suite came with Adobe Captivate plus several key applications that became part of my workflow. The main applications from that suite that were important to me were Photoshop and Audition. I relied on those apps for years after upgrading to newer versions of Captivate. Until very recently, Photoshop CS5 was more than enough for my needs. A few years ago I became very serious about my photography and began purchasing copies of Lightroom. Eventually, I signed up for the Creative Cloud photography plan for about $10 month. This last fall there was some great pricing on the full Creative Cloud that I decided to take advantage of. It allowed me to get the latest version of all my applications for only a few dollars more than I was spending on the Photography plan and another third party service that I no longer felt was needed. This now allows me to have the latest version of several other applications which have proven beneficial as well.

Microsoft Office

It’s almost automatic that a PC user will have some version of Microsoft Office. I took advantage of some really good pricing on Office 2013 a few years ago and I haven’t felt the need to upgrade to Office 2016. Perhaps in a few years, I will be forced to but for right now 2013 is fine.

Snagit

I purchased Snagit 11 a number of years ago and I install this on each computer I have used since then. It is the defector standard for screen capture applications. In a pinch, I could get away without it but it’s annotation and markup tools are really nice and certainly easy to use.

PureText

I’m not even sure when I first became aware of PureText but PureText is a simple application that sits in your system tray. When you copy some text from various sources, in most cases you are also copying some text formatting as well. One click on the PureText icon in your system tray will strip out any formatting before you paste it into your destination application, which for me is typically Adobe Captivate. Captivate doesn’t always play well with formatting, especially from Microsoft Word, so this is a nice feature to have at my disposal. Puretext can be downloaded for free from stevemiller.net.

FileZilla

At some point, I usually need to upload my published eLearning projects to a web server. For me, there is nothing I need from a file transfer protocol (FTP) application that FileZilla cannot provide. Like PureText, FileZilla is completely free. In this case, FileZilla is open source. At present, it falls under the GNU General Public License so there are no ads embedded in the application and unless you get the software from a disreputable source there is no bundled crapware that comes along with it. It’s a great choice for FTP software.

About Me

I've combined my passion for design, usic and photography; with my desire to teach, to become a highly sought after Instructional Designer, Developer, facilitator. If you need help building your next eLearning project, consider hiring me. I create learning solutions that are not only visually appealing, but effective at achieving not only the student's goals, but the organization's business goals as well.