At the end of last year I finally got around to playing with the demo version of Macromedia Captivate, and my initial impression was quite favorable. In that brief review I promised that I would create identical tutorials in each tool so we could all compare the output. They’re not pretty or pedagogically sound; I just wanted to get something done for comparison’s sake. Here you go!
Captivate – ERIC Thesaurus
ViewletBuilder Pro – ERIC Thesaurus
My side-by-side impressions? I do still like ViewletBuilder, and it’s already bought and paid for. It took me less time to build the ViewletBuilder tutorial, but I am inimately familiar with it, while this was my first kick at Captivate. I’ve got to say either product can get the job done. They both offer similar quiz features (I haven’t looked at all the advanced features in Captivate yet, so there may be more there). Captivate offers a lot more bells and whistles, including fancy animation and of course integration with the full version of Flash and other Macromedia products.
Cost: Captivate is $199 US for an educational license, ViewletBuilder Pro is $399 US for an educational license. Hmmm, that’s not good – I’m pretty sure that’s more than I paid for the product back in 2001, though it has improved significantly. ViewletBuilder Standard is available with an educational price of $239, but it doesn’t offer the quiz or interactivity features. I noticed while I was surfing the Qarbon website that they are offering a deal to upgrade from any of the competitors (Camtasia, Captivate, Robodemo, or Turbodemo) to ViewletBuilder Pro for $200, and I’ll bet if you really pushed you might be able to get an educational discount on that price too.
Trial: You can try both products for free if you like – Captivate offers the full version for 30 days, after which it will cease to work, and ViewletBuilder offers the full version also for 30 days, but the products created will have a superimposed watermark until you pay for the licensed version, which will remove them.
Compatibility: Both products work on Windows 2K or XP. ViewletBuilder works back to Win98, and also works on some Linux and Solaris platforms (probably not a huge market). Unfortunately, neither appear to work on the Mac platform.
Oh, as I was uploading I noticed one other thing you might be interested in – the ViewletBuilder .swf file (Flash) was just about exactly half the size as the .swf file Captivate created. I suspect the extra size comes from the animated text I used in the Captivate presentation.
Comments
8 Responses to “Macromedia Captivate vs. Qarbon Viewletbuilder Pro”
How about Demo Builder vs. Qarbon Viewletbuilder Pro
Demo Builder v4.0
http://www.demo-builder.com
I offer a significant corrention on ViewletBuilder Pro’s educational price which is currently US$199 (since January 1, 2006). This an increase over the 2005 educational price of $159. Corporate, list price remains at $299 as it has been througout 2005. ViewletBuilder Standard was discontinied in late 2004.
Thanks for the update, Jim.
Flash Demo Builder offer more complete features for $99. It can even burn the presentation into a DVD movie (playable on TV using standard DVD player).
There are MANY things FlashDemoBuider doesn’t do as well! Qarbon is a solid US based company and owns the Patent on the cursor animation so widely used by the competition. I noticed your product seems to copy this technology. We would be happy to license this IP to you. Let me know if you want to discuss this further Michael. We are always seeking out potential infringers. Why buy a copy when you can have the original 🙂
Sigh. Reading the post above, I remembered that I’ve noticed this same ‘We will sue you’ set of threats issued by Qarbon reps on other websites. NOT impressed. 🙁
Thanks Jay, you just made me a Captivate buyer. And if you want to sue them, good luck, Adobe’s a multibillion dollar company with a crack legal team no doubt.
Hi Lee, it probably doesn’t change your view, but I just wanted to point out that Jay was talking about FlashDemoBuilder, not Captivate…
I’ve used Captivate a lot and Qarbon just a little. There are several things about Qarbon that make me prefer it over Captivate:
1) The text captions automatically put space between the text you enter and the edge of the caption, which makes for a professional look. If you want space between the text and edge of the caption in Captivate, you have to manually put a few spaces in at the beginning of each line, which is tedious and time-consuming.
2) The text entry feature works every time in Qarbon, unlike in Captivate. In Captivate, it would work a few times, then not work, then it would work again… If it’s not reliable, it’s not very useful.
3) There was a huge difference in the size of the Captivate files and Qarbon files. A 30-slide demo I created in Qarbon only took up 414 KB of memory. A similar demo in Captivate used about 5 times as much memory.
4) When Captivate files get large, all sorts of weird things start happening: you can’t open the text captions on some slides to edit them, the drop-down menus disappear after you click on them, the movie closes when you click on a particular slide…I could go on. So far, none of these things have happened in Qarbon. Granted, I haven’t created really large demos yet, but still…
So there’s my comparison…