Does your organization fund managers and development roles? Then you probably should be considering software that will get people up to speed on the job. It’s a lot cheaper than having a bunch of individuals sign up for expensive training courses. LMS content creation software can help your developers and end users learn how to use the software with relative ease. To choose the right tool, it may be helpful to take a look at the most authoring tools.
If you are looking for authoring tools that can help you create online courses in a more efficient manner, look no further! In this post you will find a list of authoring software to suit all of your course creation needs.
Mindflash
Best for launching initial programs, global & blending training, distinct content needs, and as a complete solution for large programs.
Mindflash Pricing: It has three pricing plans i.e. Standard, Premium, and Enterprise. You can get a quote for any of these plans. As per reviews, Mindflash LMS’s price starts at $3500/year.
Skip the classroom, train anywhere. Mindflash’s cloud-based e-learning platform provides a simple, intuitive training solution for employees working from home, in the office, or field.
We make it easier for business leaders to enable customers, contractors, their employees, and other key partners for success through dynamic training courses available online.
Core Features:
- Mindflash is useful for Employee Training, Onboarding, Virtual Classroom, and Compliance Training.
- It provides Perfect Content Conversion Features that will let you create new course content or import the existing one.
- It is the solution for every industry and can be used by enterprises.
- It provides the features for quizzes, reports & dashboards, SCORM & API, etc.
Cons:
- As per the reviews, reporting features need improvement.
Deployment Type: Cloud Hosted.=> Visit Mindflash Website
SkyPrep
Best For Small to large organizations looking for an easy solution to train employees, customers, and/or partners.
SkyPrep Pricing: $199 – $499 USD per month. It also offers a free trial of 14 days.
SkyPrep is an award-winning Learning Management System, recognized by industry experts for its ease of use and outstanding customer support. The cloud-based solution enables you to deliver, manage, and track your training with ease.
SkyPrep’s intuitive platform helps you to create online learning programs quickly and with little effort. Create courses and reports to track learner performance with only a few clicks of a button. Enhance the learning experience by using game-based learning to make training more enjoyable and engaging for your team.
By using SkyPrep, you will be able to onboard employees, train customers on your products, and keep up with compliance requirements effortlessly.
Core Features:
- Capable of creating courses and unlimited training content with real-time reporting.
- Enhances course distribution and provides the ability to customize the course as per the customer’s requirement.
- Track and analyze learner progress and course performance.
- Allows learning and development professionals to sell courses online.
- Customize your platform with white-labeling options from custom colors and logos to personalized automated emails.
- Offers a brilliant resource center, user tracking, and management process for the improvement of each individual.
- Powerful integrations and is fully secure. It also supports multiple language interfaces for better communication.
- Train multiple audiences through sub-platform hierarchies.
Cons:
- SkyPrep has a course authoring tool but it offers limited functionality.
- Cannot swap old videos with new ones in the Resource Center. You need to delete the existing video and upload the new one.
Number of Customers: 500+.
Deployment Type: Open API and Cloud hosted.=> Visit SkyPrep Website
ProProfs LMS
Best For: Businesses of all sizes in all industries as well as educational institutions and private tutors.
ProProfs Pricing: Starts at $2/learner/month (billed annually). Try any plan free for 15 days.
ProProfs LMS is the world’s easiest cloud LMS that you can use to deploy corporate training programs such as compliance, HR, and sexual harassment training. Lightweight, clean, and intuitive, the platform can help you get online employee training up and running in minutes.
It provides both pre and post-training support and people of all experience levels can use it. Its suite of software solutions for workplace training includes a quiz-making tool, surveys, collaboration tools, and advanced reporting.
Core Features:
- ProProfs LMS offers a premium library of 100+ ready-to-use courses and templates. These resources are easily customizable with branding.
- A centralized and secure virtual classroom lets you manage learner groups, group admins, course assignments, and tracking in one place.
- The Q&A community facilitates knowledge sharing and peer-to-peer social learning.
- Beautifully designed quizzes for assessment keep learners engaged and help you evaluate knowledge retention.
- The LMS also supports reporting & analytics that help you extract insights on course participation, completion rates, engagement levels, and knowledge gaps.
Cons:
- Full features are available only with the premium plan and above.
Number of Customers: 15+ million
Deployment Type: Cloud Hosted (Amazon and IBM).=> Visit ProProfs LMS Website
iSpring Learn
Best For – iSpring Learn is a very fast and easy-to-use LMS that comes with all essential LMS features at an affordable price. The platform allows users to launch training programs for a variety of goals: onboarding, product training, sales training, channel training, compliance training, certification, and more.
Price: US $2.82 – US $3.66 per user/month, billed annually. It also provides a 30-day free trial to allow potential customers to test iSpring’s capacities.
iSpring is a fast-growing corporate training platform that provides a final boost to your competitive knowledge. Users can automate and control best practice delivery.
With iSpring, learning goes beyond the classroom and learners can study from anywhere with any device. It keeps track of who is studying and who is not for enhanced productivity.
Core Features:
- iSpring Learn offers a systematic learning path for each individual, along with the flexibility to customize the path structure according to a learner’s needs.
- It provides SCORM support, a variety of supported formats, and unlimited storage space.
- The LMS can send invitation emails, has a self-registration feature, and users’ data can be imported from CSV files or via the REST/SOAP API.
- It allows you to group learners and set different user roles to mirror users’ actual corporate structure in the LMS.
- It also provides detailed reporting on users’ progress.
- iSpring Learn provides an Event Calendar that lets administrators organize activities easily: live training, workshops, and webinars all in one place.
- It is integrated with Zoom and Microsoft Teams and provides users with an opportunity to use the services for web meetings, which can be planned and held within the training portal.
- With iSpring Learn, you pay only for active users.
Cons:
- iSpring Learn doesn’t have a marketplace with premade learning content.
- It does not have a function for analyzing the content for keywords to tag it automatically.
- The LMS lacks eCommerce features.
Number of Customers: Approximately 2,000.
Deployment Type: Cloud-hosted=> Visit iSpring Learn Website
TalentLM
Best For: The support team provides an excellent response due to which the work becomes a lot easier when issues are fixed quickly.
Price: Ranging from the US $29 – the US $349 per month when billed annually. It also comes with a free version for up to 5 users and 10 courses.
TalentLMS is a very flexible learning management system that is developed to create a compact, most instinctive, simple, and hassle-free learning experience. It is an online e-platform, which is instantly available and provides great scalability and power to spare.
It offers strong program development tools that adjust to various e-learning platforms.
Core Features:
- TalentLMS comes with strong management of course authoring, course branding, course catalog, course marketplace and is content friendly.
- It has a good custom homepage, reporting, branding, and fields that provide flexibility to the customers as per their needs and requirements.
- It provides individual plans, defines user roles, mobile accessibility, grading system, and training metrics for customers.
- It has good registration management, ILT support, web conference, display transcripts, data import and export, testing, etc.
- It supports exam engines, e-commerce, notifications, multi-organization structure, training metrics, etc.
Cons:
- The setup of learning programs and materials can be more structured and robust.
- More control on language variations can be implemented.
- TalentLMS needs to improve a lot in the customer support department.
Number of Customers: 4100 approximately.
Deployment Type: Cloud-Hosted, Open API
Lectora Online
- Type: Web-based
- SCORM support: 1.2 / 2004
- Price: $500/year per author
Lectora Online is an online SCORM course builder that has instruments for creating interactive slides with quizzes. It has a library of stock images for rapid course creation and integrates with Branchtrack, a dialogue simulation maker. Published SCORM content is WCAG compliant.
Knowbly
- Type: Web-based
- SCORM support: 1.2 / 2004
- Price: $495/year per author
Knowbly is the new kid on the block, launched just a year ago. It has a standard set of tools that can help you build SCORM courses with text, media, interactions, and quizzes. The product has built-in analytics that should help you understand how your learners go through the modules.
Coassemble
- Type: Web-based
- SCORM support: 1.2 / 2004
- Price: from $490/year
Coassemble is a cloud-based SCORM content creator with LMS capabilities. It provides 10 ready-made templates for creating courses that can be filled with content pieces like images, videos, quizzes, and texts. The finished content can be assigned to learners via the Coassemble LMS.
Gomo Learning
- Type: Web-based
- SCORM support: 1.2 / 2004
- Price: $495/year per author
Gomo is cloud-based SCORM creation software with content management capabilities. It’s being advertised as a good solution if you aim at mobile learning over anything else. Editing and redesigning built-in templates can be tricky, but it’s a good fit for bite-size learning.
Easygenerator
- Type: Web-based
- SCORM support: 1.2 / 2004
- Price: from $990/year
Easygenerator is a web-based SCORM creation tool that allows you to assemble courses with its drag-and-drop features. You can choose premade templates and customize them to make generic but great looking courses in a fraction of the time it would otherwise take. The tool also allows you to track students’ progress and send certificates of completion to your learners.
Adapt Learning
- Type: Self-hosted web-based
- SCORM support: 1.2 / 2004
- Price: Free (open source)
Adapt is an open-source SCORM authoring tool that has been around for almost 5 years. It can build slides, quizzes, embed media, export SCORM – all the standard stuff. The main difference is that you need to install it on your own server, which might be a hassle for those that have never done that.
iSpring Suite Max
- Type: Desktop + web-based
- SCORM support: 1.2 / 2004
- Platform: Windows
- Price: $970/year per author
iSpring Suite Max is a SCORM authoring toolkit that includes a PowerPoint add-in and a number of standalone instruments, each specialized in creating a certain type of learning content. For example, QuizMaker is used to create quizzes, Cam Pro lets you record and edit screencasts, Flip can convert PDF/DOC files into learning modules, and so on. There are 7 different tools in all, including Content Library – a collection of predesigned templates and images you can use in your courses to enjoy a faster process than coming up with designs on your own.
You can start using iSpring Suite with no previous experience in eLearning authoring. Grab a PowerPoint presentation, add some interactive content using the dedicated tools included in Suite, and publish a mobile-ready SCORM course that can be uploaded straight to your LMS.
Spring Suite Max also features an online authoring tool for creating simple courses and tests right in a browser.
Try iSpring Suite right now by signing up for a 30-day free trial →
Articulate 360
- Type: Desktop + web-based
- SCORM support: 1.2 / 2004
- Platform: Windows
- Price: $1,299/year per author
Articulate 360 is another all-round SCORM-compliant software combining a quiz maker, a screen recorder, and many other things. Like iSpring Suite, it is built around creating interactive slides and combining them into an eLearning module. Being a standalone application, it offers more in terms of programming different learning scenarios but has a steeper learning curve.
Like iSpring Suite, it features a content library with slide templates and character images. Plus, it includes an online authoring solution called “Rise” that can be used to create simple SCORM content in your browser.
Adobe Captivate
- Type: Desktop
- SCORM support: 1.2 / 2004
- Platform: Windows / Mac
- Price: $400/year per author
Adobe Captivate is a SCORM software that comes as a standalone slide-based content maker with a quiz builder, an interactive video creator, and a content library. Basically, it offers functionality comparable to that of Articulate and iSpring, but with some more advanced features. For example, it has a separate instrument for making SCORM software simulations and a tool that allows you to build VR learning products by adding interactions on top of 360° images or videos. But, with great power comes a great learning curve, so using this one requires training like no other.
TechSmith Camtasia
- Type: Desktop
- SCORM support: 1.2 / 2004
- Platform: Windows / Mac
- Price: $250 for a lifetime license
Camtasia is an authoring tool specialized in screen recording and video editing. It lets one record a screencast and/or webcam, and then add visual instructions to various parts of the recorded video. It can also freeze the video at a certain moment so you can add a quiz question on top of it. You can use Camtasia to create interactive videos as SCORM courses and upload them to your LMS.
iSpring Free
- Type: Desktop
- SCORM support: 1.2 / 2004
- Platform: Windows
- Price: Free
iSpring Free is a free SCORM authoring tool. It’s a no cost version of iSpring’s PowerPoint add-in that also features a much simpler version of QuizMaker with just three question types (multiple response / multiple-choice / fill-in-the blank). This tool is easy to start with if you have no experience in SCORM content authoring.
Conclusion
Authoring tools are a great way for someone to easily create their own learning management system with minimal effort. They can be as simple or as complicated as you want them to be, and sometimes it can save money if you’re creating it yourself instead of paying for elearning software.