Elucidat vs the iSpring Suite: Comparison and Review

How does Elucidat stack up against the iSpring suite? Is Elucidat a good alternative to iSpring? Let’s review the two elearning authoring tools and see how they compare…

In this comparison, we’re going to focus our review on the main criteria people consider when choosing an elearning authoring tool:

1. Ease of use – how steep is the learning curve? How user-friendly is the interface?
2. Quality of elearning output – what kind of learning experience does the finished course offer?
3. Speed and efficiency of authoring – how quickly can you get your course out there? How much time does it require of authors?
4. Scaling up of production – how well does the tool cope if you want to create multiple course? Or if you have lots of authors?

iSpring vs Elucidat: At-a-glance comparison table

Is Elucidat a good alternative to iSpring?

Let’s take a closer look at each of the tools to see how they perform against each of the key criteria.

Ease of use

iSpring

Established PowerPoint users should be able to get up and running with iSpring fairly easily. However, those unfamiliar with PowerPoint may face a steeper learning curve. iSpring is created with Microsoft users in mind, so Mac users may need to look at alternatives.

Elucidat

Elucidat comes with pre-built interactions and activities so that novice users can easily produce engaging courses. The Learning Accelerator add-on goes one step further, offering templated course designs so new users can just plug in their content and launch.

Quality of elearning output

iSpring

iSpring offers 14 different interaction types, branching and a dialogue simulator. The asset library includes graphics and characters.

The overall look of an iSpring course will be familiar to PowerPoint users. It’s simple, clean and professional – albeit with that recognizable slide deck feel.

Elucidat

Elucidat’s template library includes a range of engaging interactions to use out of the box. If you’re looking for freedom to exercise your creativity, the layout designer feature allows you to build your own pages without code.

Elucidat offers features like personalized rules, branching, social polling and gamification to really hook learners into the experience. The analytics dashboards give you plenty of data to understand how users are interacting with your course, and where you might want to make changes.

The Learning Accelerator add-on provides you with templates for courses with best practice learning design practice baked in so that even authors with no learning design expertise can create high-quality courses.

Have a look at the great elearning examples on Elucidat’s showcase, many of which can be used as a template to kickstart your course.

Speed and efficiency of authoring

iSpring

For seasoned PowerPoint users, the creation of an iSpring course will be fairly quick and efficient.

However, for authors wanting to work with others to create their courses, iSpring’s lack of collaboration features could make things more tricky. It’s better suited to those working on solo projects.

Elucidat

Elucidat offers lots of features built with speed and efficiency in mind:

• A template library
• A suite of interactions
• Brand importer
• A WYSIWYG interface

To speed things up even more, you can choose to use a Learning Accelerator template and create a course to a tried-and-tested structure four times faster.

Scaling up of production

iSpring

Learning paths can be created, saved and reused in iSpring for quick access. Courses can be launched through a Learning Management System, or iSpring’s own LMS.

Courses can be copied and reused, but have no direct links, which can make updating courses at scale an issue. Branding can’t be saved locally, so make sure each of your team members have the right settings if you want branding consistently applied across all courses.

Elucidat

Elucidat is a cloud-based authoring tool so it’s easy for several authors to work on the same project at the same time. It comes with a central asset library meaning colleagues can share assets across departments.

Where you want to create several versions of a course, the variations manager lets you create one simple master course. Different versions of this master can then be created underneath it. This means all versions are editable at the master level so changes can be made quickly and applied across the whole suite.

See how Elucidat shapes up against other tools:

• Best elearning authoring tools and software blog – full list of the most popular tools on the market today.
• Elucidat vs GoMo Learning: Comparison and Review – Check out which tool has the features that fit best with your needs.
• Articulate Storyline 360, Rise and Elucidat software review – see how each tool shapes up, to help you make the right choice!

Want to find out more?

If you want to find out more about how Elucidat and iSpring compare, start a free trial of Elucidat to see what it can do for. We’ll get you off to a great start with a demo.