Articulate Storyline 3 vs. Storyline 360: Which Should You Buy?
This week, Articulate announced Articulate Storyline 3. As you likely know, back in November 2016, Articulate released Articulate 360, which includes Articulate Storyline 360 and several other tools and resources.
As you can imagine, this announcement has raised some eyebrows, with some folks wondering what the differences are between Storyline 3 and Storyline 360, and which version they should purchase. The truth is, there aren’t too many differences between the two versions (at least right now). The major difference is how you purchase each of the two versions of Storyline.
Unlike the subscription-based model used to make Storyline 360 available as part of the Articulate 360 suite; Storyline 3 is offered with a perpetual license. This means you pay once and you have access to Storyline 3 forever. What you don’t get, are the all the new features Articulate will add to Storyline over time. With the Storyline 3 perpetual license, you may have to wait and purchase a new license for Storyline 4 to get access to the latest and greatest features.
To learn more, check out my video below to see the differences between Articulate Storyline 3 and Storyline 360, and get some tips if you’re still not sure which one is right for you.
Thanks for the summary Tim! Our organization is in discussions now about this very topic. The 360 Subscription would end up being over $20K annually for us, and may price us out of the platform. As we are currently running almost 20 licenses of Storyline 1, we have not upgraded due to the cost and desire to have all developers on the same version.
This offer of Storyline 3 at the usual upgrade price is very attractive. What is your opinion about Storyline 360 and/or Storyline 3 and its iPad user experience versus Storyline 1?
Thanks, you clarified the issue for me.
Which version do you use, Tim?
As usual, Tim did a great job explaining something. In this case, he clearly and succinctly laid out the differences between the two Articulate products. I can’t imagine how anyone would want to purchase Storyline 3 when Articulate 360 has a ton more products, flexibility, etc. Thanks, Tim. you did it again–another 14 on the 10 point scale. You Rock!
I was actually looking for a bit more information here. I already understood the concept of perpetual licenses vs. subscription, updates, etc. What I was looking for was a quick synopsis of the kinds of things I can do with the extra tools in the suite (Rise, Studio, Peek, Replay, etc.) that I can’t do with Storyline 3 alone without having to spend a lot of time researching those individual tools.
Hi Tracy,
Please note that this post was written over three years ago. The purpose was to highlight the differences between Storyline 3, Storyline 360, along with all of the new features of the Articulate 360 suite. At the time of this post, there were no differences between Storyline 3 and 360, besides the fact that one offered a subscription and the other was perpetual. If you’d like to know the current differences between Storyline 3 and 360, you can easily find that…
Here: https://articulate.com/360/storyline
And here: https://articulate.com/p/storyline-3
Hi Tim,
This is Josephine from Hong Kong.
To produce online learning modules, which tool you would recommend? iSpring or Storyline?
Hi Josephine! Thanks for reaching out. Personally, I prefer Storyline. It offers many more options for creating custom eLearning.