You’ve decided to make the swap from Adobe Captivate to Articulate 360, so what comes next? The all-important migration phase.
As anyone who’s headed up a platform migration will tell you, they have a habit of getting messy without the right plan behind them.
The temptation is to treat it as a straight transfer: move everything across and get it working ASAP. Instead, migration should be seen as an opportunity, a chance to tidy up first. After all, there’s no point spending precious time moving over a complex course nobody uses anymore.
Cataloguing your current content and converting courses over both take careful planning. Here’s our guide to moving from Captivate to Articulate, with as little fuss as possible.
Why do people move from Captivate to Articulate?
There are plenty of reasons teams make the switch, and if you’re still weighing it up, we’ve written a detailed guide comparing Articulate vs Captivate that’s worth a look.
For those who’ve already made the decision, it usually comes down to a few recurring reasons:
- Versatility: Articulate 360 includes a suite of apps covering every stage of the build, from putting the course together to tracking how it performs once it’s live. With Rise 360 and Storyline 360 both included, teams get the best of both worlds: quick, templated builds when speed matters, and full creative control when a course calls for something more bespoke.
- Ease of use: Articulate is widely seen as the more intuitive option, so teams can get up to speed with it more quickly.
- Faster course building: Rise 360 is designed for speed, with ready-made templates, interaction blocks, a large asset library, and a simple drag-and-drop editor that gets courses from brief to build in far less time.
- Better collaboration tools: Review 360 makes it easy for stakeholders to leave feedback directly on a course, giving teams one centralised hub for sign-off.
- Built for global scale: Articulate Localization has built-in translation workflows to support multi-language rollouts with ease.
If you’re still deliberating between the two, our Captivate content audit framework can help you assess your current setup, with a score that shows you what’s performing well and, more importantly, what isn’t.
Migrating from Captivate to Articulate: 10 tips for a smooth transition
1. Audit what you already have
Transferring courses, especially the complex ones, takes time. That’s why we recommend trimming the fat before you migrate, so you’re not wasting hours rebuilding something nobody needs.
Start by cataloguing everything you’ve already got in Captivate. From there, track key details against each course: when it was last accessed and updated, who owns it, how long it runs, and what interactions it uses. This will come in handy for the next steps.
Then, to work out whether a course makes the cut (or gets the cut), ask:
- What learning goal does this content serve?
- Is it still accurate?
- Is this a duplicate of something else in your library?
- Has anyone completed it in the last 12 months?
- Does it still reflect current processes, products, or policy?
From there, sort everything into four buckets: migrate, update then migrate, archive, or retire.
👉 Read next: Get audit-ready with our learning needs analysis framework
2. Decide between Rise and Storyline
Once you know what’s staying, think about how each course will be rebuilt in Articulate. As a rough rule:
- Rise: best for quick, templated builds
- Storyline: best for custom or more complex builds
How you split things between the two really comes down to your team’s workload and why you’re migrating in the first place. If you’re in a large organisation with new starters joining all the time, a high-priority onboarding course might be a better fit for Rise, where getting it up and running quickly is the priority.
A flagship leadership development course full of branching scenarios, on the other hand, is more likely to need Storyline’s flexibility. Most teams end up leaning on both, and that’s the beauty of Articulate: you get to pick the right tool for each course.
3. Prioritise the workload
With your migration course list confirmed, the easiest way to stay on top of things is with a simple labelling system, whether that’s through Asana, a spreadsheet, or a shared document. You should sort courses using a traffic light system based on the following two criteria:
Priority
- High: business-critical courses, such as compliance training for new starters
- Medium: courses that keep day-to-day work ticking along, but aren’t tied to a deadline or risk
- Low: the nice-to-haves. Good to have in your library, but not first in line
Complexity
- High: courses packed with interactions, branching, or plenty of moving parts. These will most likely be your Storyline courses
- Medium: a bit of both: some static content, some custom touches
- Low: mostly linear, text- and image-led, with minimal interactivity. They’ll probably be transferred to Rise
High-priority content should be tackled first regardless, but how you sequence the work after that is up to you. Some teams will prefer to focus on the most complex challenges initially, though for momentum, easy wins might be the better route – and help your team familiarise themselves with the tool before diving into the deeper stuff.
4. Factor in training time
Like any new tool, there’ll be a bit of a learning curve at first. Articulate is pretty intuitive, but setting aside proper time to get to grips with it, even if that means pulling someone away from their usual workload for a day or two, will save you far more time than muddling through and working it out as you go.
👉 Expert-led training: Explore our hands-on Articulate courses
5. Build a realistic roadmap
Once your priority list is sorted, it’s time to map out a timeline for the whole migration. Give yourself rough time estimates per course, and remember you’re rebuilding rather than starting from scratch, so most courses should move faster than a brand-new build would.
A short, simple course with minimal interactivity might take half a day per person, while a longer course with custom interactions or branching could take a week or more. Leave a bit of breathing room for the unexpected, too; it’s always better to give yourself more time than you think you need, rather than scrambling to hit a deadline that was never realistic in the first place.
Give each course a clear owner, and work in phases: start with your high-priority migrations first, working down through medium and low, and slot the update-then-migrate group in wherever it makes sense against that same priority order, since these will take longer to turn around.
👉 More from OL: How long does it take to build eLearning?
6. Export what you can…
Some individual assets carry across easily: images, audio files, video content and existing text. Wherever possible, export these directly from Captivate rather than recreating them from scratch.
It’s also worth considering whether you’re moving to a new LMS as well as a new authoring tool. If you’re changing LMS but don’t need to update the course content, existing SCORM packages may be uploaded to the new LMS without rebuilding them. However, if you’re also moving from Captivate to Articulate so the content can be maintained going forward, you’ll need to rebuild the courses, as published SCORM packages cannot be converted into editable Articulate projects.
7. …And rebuild what you can’t
This is the more time-consuming part. Complex variables, advanced triggers, and custom interactions won’t simply drop into Rise or Storyline; they’ll need rebuilding in Articulate. It’s worth setting aside extra time here, especially for your trickiest, highest-complexity courses, since these are the ones that’ll eat into your schedule the most.
8. Test everything
A new system means testing from scratch, so don’t assume everything will behave exactly as it did in Captivate. Take the time to check each course across different devices and browsers, and make accessibility part of your testing from the outset rather than something to revisit once everything else has been signed off.
👉 Related: Common accessibility mistakes
9. Don’t chase a like-for-like match
While Captivate and Articulate are both advanced tools with some similarities, the platforms do differ. When migrating, it may be tempting to try and replicate every course exactly as it was in Captivate, but aiming for an identical match will slow you down, and sometimes it just won’t be possible. So long as the content remains the same, think of the migration as an opportunity to refresh interactions and make the most of what Articulate has to offer, rather than trying to produce a like-for-like copy.
10. Lean on Articulate’s community for troubleshooting
One of the advantages of Articulate is the support and community around it. If you hit a snag mid-build, chances are someone else has already solved it. Articulate’s community E-Learning Heroes is definitely worth bookmarking for tried-and-tested tips and tricks, along with a place to ask any questions of your own.
Get started with Articulate 360
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