The Monopoly Tax

Dirtyword interviews Mike Stein, Director of Design at ID Atlas, as he Articulates eLearning Development Pain Points

You’ve spent 20 minutes fighting an interaction that should have taken two…again. Your project timeline is already tight, and now you’re behind. You glance at the clock; it’s past 6 PM, and you’re still in the office because a button trigger won’t fire. Tomorrow’s client review is looming, and you haven’t even touched slide 47. You close the software, reopen it, and hope this time it works. It doesn’t. Was this really the software you spent weeks convincing IT and procurement to let you install?

This isn’t just a bad day; it’s a symptom of a rigged game. For over a decade, one player - Articulate Storyline - has taken over every property on the board: from corporate compliance to non-profit onboarding. As the undisputed industry standard, we’re all paying rent to play their game.

This dominance has consequences beyond market share. Businesses post jobs demanding “Storyline skills” (often exclusively), leaving new designers wondering, “Am I even a real ID if I don’t use it?”

And it’s easy to see why: Storyline is powerful, established, and its PowerPoint-inspired, slide-based editing makes picking up the software easy. But that same familiarity hides real costs. We’ve been sold the “blank canvas” as the epitome of creative freedom, but it’s an illusion. The tool has already made many critical decisions for us, encouraging designers to build what the tool does best rather than what might be most effective.

But the game is changing. A new generation of cloud-based competitors is here. They are building their own infrastructure, their own properties, and in many cases, their rent is significantly cheaper.

Introducing ID Atlas’s Landmark Research

Dirtyword has long tracked the shifts and frictions within the eLearning development space. When Mike Stein and his team at ID Atlas, an instructional design agency with over a decade of experience using dominant tools like Storyline and Captivate, decided to stop wondering if the development pain was necessary, we paid attention.

Mike Stein, Director of Design at ID Atlas, launched an ambitious, independent project: Articulating eLearning Development Pain Points. The goal was to scientifically measure the experience across leading cloud-based authoring tools to quantify the true cost of tool dominance.

To do this, ID Atlas designed a single, comprehensive course with all assets pre-built. They then pressure-tested 10 web-based platforms in an authoring tool build-off, tracking every click, minute, and keystroke to quantify what he calls the “monopoly tax.” Is a 6-hour build in Storyline truly providing four times the value of a 90-minute build in a modern alternative? That’s what this project was determined to find out.

Dirtyword sat down with Mike Stein, of ID Atlas to learn more about this project and the key findings.

Setting the Rules

Dirtyword: Mike, you make a bold claim about the Articulate monopoly and the tax we pay to use Storyline. This research project is your evidence; but how do you objectively measure a subjective experience? What was your scientific methodology for turning friction and frustration into hard data?

Mike Stein: That’s the challenge, right? How do you objectively measure a feeling? Maybe that’s one of the reasons this type of research hasn’t really been attempted before.

I’m a 10-year veteran of Storyline and Captivate. My own bias, and the industry’s reliance on these tools, is the problem. We had to create a system that could challenge the ‘standard’ on neutral ground, free from both our own assumptions and any outside influence. This was an entirely independent, unsponsored project. We were not paid by any of these vendors; we just wanted real answers. To do that, we had to separate the art of instructional design from the friction of development.

First, we designed a single, comprehensive course storyboard: our control. Then, we pre-built every single asset. The script, images, audio files, and videos were finalized before the clock started on development. This step isolated the design phase completely, ensuring we were only measuring the development experience.

Then we ran the builds. We gave 10 of the top web-based platforms the same storyboard, same assets, and the same goal: build the exact same course. This was a pure pressure test of efficiency. We recorded the build for timing and used tracking software to capture the quantitative data: every click, every keystroke, and every scroll.

But metrics don’t tell the whole story. They track effort, not friction. That’s why we added a second layer: structured qualitative data. After each build, the developer (myself and another designer on my team) completed a detailed intake survey. We captured those immediate, raw feelings: the wow moments, the points of friction, and the features that felt like we were fighting the tool. That qualitative data served as the basis for the 1-5 star ratings in each sub-category, and we considered it relevant when it was corroborated across these surveys and backed by the hard data.

Finally, we addressed the new user problem. We intentionally went into most of these tools blind to capture that initial learning curve. However, after the build, we did deep-dive research to see if a hidden feature or an expert-level workflow would have solved our pain points. So while the quantitative questions measured our personal experience, the final ratings reflect a tool’s full capability, not just a first impression.

This four-part system (the standardized course, the quantitative metrics, the qualitative debrief, and the post-build research) is how we turned a subjective feel into an objective, data-backed score.

Luxury Tax

DW: Let’s talk about that monopoly tax you mentioned. It’s not just referring to the pricing model; your data shows the industry standard (Storyline) took 6 hours to build, while you were able to build the same course in less than 1 hour with some of the cloud tools. Is the 6-hour product really not better? Or, to use the metaphor, are we just comparing a Bentley to a Buick?

MS: That’s the central question we wanted to answer with this project. Yes, in a vacuum, the 6-hour Storyline course is objectively better. We were able to use our full toolbox of tricks: custom layers, easter eggs, background music, and complete control of the media. It’s a very sleek final product that we’d be proud to deliver to a client. In contrast, every cloud tool we tested forced some kind of compromise. We couldn’t rebuild every interaction 1-to-1 and we had to re-think our design to fit scrolling, block-based platforms.

But, let’s look at the numbers. The Storyline build took 6 hours. The average build time for the cloud tools was about 90 minutes. The fastest builds took under an hour. That’s a 4x to 7x difference in development time.

So, this begs the real ROI question: Is the Storyline product four times better? Is the learning four times more engaging? Will the learner remember four times as much? When you look at the side-by-side comparisons in our project showcase, it’s pretty clear the answer is no. The final products are shockingly similar.

And it’s not just more time; it was exponentially more work. Our tracking software showed the 6-hour Storyline build required 12,192 clicks and 10,474 keys. The 50-minute iSpring Pages build took only 1,471 clicks and 1,411 keys. That’s over 8 times the physical effort to develop an equivalent course. That is the monopoly tax quantified.

We assume the 6-hour build is a Bentley, and that the high price and high effort are just the cost of luxury and power. But the data shows it’s often just an older, less efficient model we’re paying a premium for out of habit. Meanwhile, the modern cloud tools get you to the same destination in a fraction of the time and don’t demand eight times the effort to turn the key.

The Iron Triangle

DW: So, what’s the alternative? For freelancers, a free tool like Coassemble or a low-cost option like Genially seems like a no-brainer. But for large organizations, the $1,500 for Storyline or even $10,000 for the premium Lectora bundle is monopoly money. How much does price really matter when selecting a tool?

MS: For freelancers and small businesses, the sticker price is a huge factor. The good news is, the rent is significantly cheaper on these cloud properties. You have Coassemble’s free forever plan for single users. You have Genially’s monthly $10 low-cost entry point. Even some of the most popular tools, like Parta, iSpring Pages, and Evolve are less than half the annual cost of the Articulate suite, so you definitely have options. For this group, the value is obvious: you can get a modern, capable tool for a fraction of the price.

But for big organizations, you’re right, the license fee is a rounding error. The real cost, the one they’re ignoring, is the developer’s salary. This is the monopoly tax in another form. Is your $60/hour developer spending 6 hours on a build that should take 1.5? That’s a massive, quantifiable ROI drain that dwarfs the annual cost of the software.

DW: So if the real cost is the developer’s time, are we still just stuck choosing between speed and power?

MS: That’s the main trade-off we found, and it’s where the qualitative data is so important. You have tools like iSpring, 7taps, and Coassemble that are incredibly fast to build in. However, the trade-off is that you’re creatively locked in. The tool controls a lot of the design. On the other hand, you have tools like Parta and Genially that give you that blank canvas freedom, but come with a steeper learning curve and demand the time needed for that extra customization.

DW: But doesn’t a suite like Articulate 360 solve that problem? It gives you both Rise for speed and Storyline for power. Isn’t that the ideal solution?

MS: You might think so, but it’s an inflexible, all-or-nothing bundle; you’re paying for Storyline whether you need it or not. This is where a competitor like iSpring offers a more flexible model. They have a similar ecosystem with a powerful PowerPoint add-in and their cloud-based Pages tool, but they allow you to buy Pages separately for a much lower price. Articulate’s model forces you to buy the whole bundle. It’s less of a bonus and more of a strategy to ensure every user pays the full subscription price.

But even beyond that, what our data really revealed is that Speed vs. Power is too simple. The most important factor for ROI is long-term workflow efficiency. For example, Rise is fast for a first draft, but its workflow for reorganizing that course is terrible, which kills your ROI on iterations and maintenance. In contrast, Parta has a slow learning curve and requires some initial up-front investment to get going, but once you’re over that hill, its powerful reusable templates and real-time collaboration create long-term efficiencies for a team. It’s important to evaluate not just the cost of the first build; but the total cost of ownership.

And not all power tools are created equal. Lectora, for example, was a complete outlier. It represents the worst of both worlds: the high-effort, high-learning-curve of a power tool, but with a dated, clunky, and buggy interface that makes it less efficient and more frustrating than even the Storyline baseline. Despite Lectora being fully accessible from the web browser, if the choice is between Lectora and Storyline, Storyline wins every time; even if I have to buy a Windows laptop to use it.

In the end it comes down to what you value and what makes the most difference in your workflow. That’s why we put together the Priority Ranking tool. Are you willing to put up with a frustrating UI (like Chameleon) to get more built-in interactions? Is best-in-class accessibility (like isEazy) more important than a smooth workflow? These are the real factors, and they’re all qualitative. The Priority Ranker on our site lets you weigh those trade-offs and find the tool that best fits your needs.

Do Not Pass Go

DW: You’ve established that some power tools like Lectora are a bad investment in time and effort. But a high learning curve isn’t the only way a tool might send you to development jail. Your scorecards show big splits on what many would consider professional, must-have features. What are the real dealbreakers that send a tool straight to the bottom of the recommendation list, regardless of its other strengths?

MS: This was one of the most frustrating parts of the research. Some tools had such standout features that it genuinely made it fun to build in, but then they’d mess it up with something that’s often non-negotiable for certain clients or industries.

The most obvious one is Accessibility. You have tools like isEazy, Evolve, and Rise that have made it a core, best-inclass strength. isEazy’s Accessible Mode, for example, is a game-changer that ensures compliance with almost no extra developer effort by automatically creating a separate equivalent accessible experience for all of their built in interactions, including scenarios and games.

Then, you have tools that are otherwise fantastic, like iSpring Pages, that fail on the most basic accessibility features. Despite having a super streamlined editor where you could just copy and paste images, drag and drop to resize columns, and easily select and reorganize groups of elements, iSpring Pages has no alt-text, no captioning, and isn’t fully keyboard navigable. In 2025, that’s simply not acceptable.

The second major dealbreaker is the Review Workflow. There’s the friction of stakeholder access which can be a huge pain point. Some tools, like Rise and isEazy, get this right: you send a single shareable link, the reviewer types their name, and they’re in. That’s it. But other platforms, like Evolve, iSpring, or Chameleon Creator, force your non-technical SME, who just needs to provide a final signoff of an otherwise completed module, to create an account. Telling a busy VP they have to create and manage another password just to provide feedback once is a significant, unnecessary barrier.

We also found that many tools, like Rise (Review 360) and Lectora (ReviewLink), force you into a twoapp process. The comments live in a separate web application, so you’re constantly switching between the editor and the review site to see what you need to fix. Whereas the best-in-class tools, like Parta, Evolve, and isEazy, pipe the comments directly into the editor so you can see the feedback right on the section you’re working on. Parta and Evolve also let reviewers pin a comment to a specific element (this exact button, this exact text box), whereas others work on the page level. This means the SME has to write, “in the third paragraph, the second word is wrong,” which is just the old spreadsheet problem in a prettier interface.

And the third major dealbreaker is mobile responsiveness. Mobile-friendly has become a meaningless marketing term. Our research found there are really three distinct approaches on the market.

You have the Scalers, like Storyline and Genially. They don’t reflow content; they just shrink the entire desktop slide to fit the phone screen. While technically visible, it’s often unusable. Text becomes unreadable and buttons are too small to tap. The only real workaround is to create two separate, dedicated projects: one horizontal for desktop and one vertical for mobile, which is a substantial duplication of effort.

Then, you have the Automatics, like Rise, Evolve, and isEazy. They do a fantastic job of fluidly reflowing content into a clean, single-column view that works great. The trade-off is that you get no manual control. If the automatic reflow stacks two images on top of each other in a way you don’t like, you just have to live with it.

Finally, you have the granular approach, which we saw in Parta. It gives you total manual control to reorder, resize, or even hide elements specifically for the mobile view. It’s more work, but it’s the only way to achieve a truly custom, mobile-first design. This is a critical distinction that most buyers won’t see in a sales demo.

Free Parking

DW: We’ve covered the dealbreakers that can send a tool to jail. But what about Free Parking? Were there any standout features you found that offered unexpected, high-value bonuses?

MS: Absolutely. This is where you see the real innovation and personality of these tools. Some of the standout features weren’t always big-ticket items, but the small things that solve major developer pain points.

The most obvious was the feel of iSpring Pages. We gave its Developer Experience a 5/5. It was just a joy to use: fast, fluid, and intuitive, like editing an interactive Google Doc. While it failed on critical features like accessibility, its core editing experience, combined with its powerful in-tool image editor, was a huge bonus.

Another one was Parta’s error-recovery system. It has a Recycle Bin and per-block version history. That’s an incredible safety net that gives you total confidence to experiment, knowing you can never truly break your project, especially on a large team.

We also saw huge value-adds in specific media tools. Genially, for example, has in-tool audio recording and trimming, a rare combination that saves a ton of time when working with narration; plus a solid built-in media and template library to get projects off the ground.

Then there were innovative approaches to delivery. Tools like Coassemble and 7taps excel at this. They aren’t just SCORM-export tools; they are built to meet learners where they are. They generate simple, shareable links and have their own powerful analytics to track users via email or integrations, all without forcing a learner into an LMS. For anyone without a traditional LMS, that’s a significant bonus.

These are the kinds of features that don’t show up on a standard must-have checklist but make a real difference in the day-to-day quality of life for a developer.

The Get Out of Jail Free Card

DW: You’ve quantified the monopoly tax in thousands of manual clicks and keystrokes. Many of the tools you reviewed, like isEazy and Rise, are heavily pushing AI as the solution. Based on your tests, is AI just a marketing gimmick, or is it a genuine Get Out of Jail Free card for development friction?

MS: Right now, it’s a bit of both, but its potential to completely change the game is undeniable. We saw AI being implemented in a few distinct ways.

Let’s start with the most frustrating use of AI: as an intrusive upsell. We saw this most egregiously in Articulate Rise. Even if you’re on the non-AI plan, the interface still defaults to the AI Generation tab every time you add an audio block. This purposefully adds an extra click to your workflow just to get to the basic Upload or Record tabs. It’s a frustrating, ad-like experience that adds friction inside a premium product. It feels particularly sleazy because Rise is the only platform in our review that sells AI as a separate, costly add-on, while every other competitor is embracing AI and including it as a standard value-add to their subscription.

Where it starts to get more promising is AI as a content assistant. We saw this everywhere, used for different tasks. For media generation, isEazy offers AI-generated voiceovers, avatars, and images, and Genially can create images from prompts. 7taps has full Synthesia-powered AI avatars to generate video for building scenarios. Parta lets you plug in your own API key to generate text from your preferred LLM, while Genially and isEazy can generate quiz questions.

The most ambitious use is AI for full-course drafting. Coassemble has an AI-driven drafter for quick starts, and isEazy can generate an entire course from a PowerPoint or build a full editable branching scenario for you. However, we weren’t thoroughly impressed with any fully AI-generated course draft and hit a significant bug in isEazy’s AI-assisted branching that forced us to rebuild it manually. So as an assistant, it’s promising but not yet a perfect, reliable shortcut.

But the real game-changer is AI as the developer. This is where AI completely removes the monopoly tax on complex, high-effort builds. We’re already seeing this with tools like Canva AI that can generate full blown HTML code from a single prompt. For this project, we actually used Canva to build our entire data dashboard to present the results. It wasn’t one-click and it took a lot of prompt engineering and coding basics to get it across the finish line, but it proved instrumental in the development.

This vibe-coding approach, describing what you want in natural language and having AI generate the code, is the most exciting use of AI. Tools like Parta and the Rise beta already let you embed custom code. This means the 6 hours we spent in Storyline manually building custom interactions could be vibe coded in minutes and you just paste it in. This is why Storyline’s ROI is collapsing. Its main defense (the power to build custom interactions) is no longer a defensible moat. AI will do that heavy lifting, and the tools that win will be the ones that let us integrate that code seamlessly.

Winning the Game

DW: So after all the data, all the clicks, and all the frustration... just give it to us straight. What’s the best tool for a designer or L&D manager who’s ready to stop paying the monopoly tax?

MS: At the end of the day, the research showed us that there is no single best tool. No platform got it 100% right, and there are always trade-offs you’ll have to make.

Genially, for example, is a creative powerhouse; its media and interactivity scored a 20/20 in our rubric. But its responsive design capabilities (a 2/5) might be a dealbreaker for anyone who needs their courses to run beautifully on all devices. Then there’s iSpring Pages, which had the single best Developer Experience (a 5/5) of any tool we tested; that editor was just so easy to use. But its accessibility score (a 1/5) and review workflow (a 2/5) make it professionally unusable for us. It’s a beautiful racecar with no seatbelts.

This is what led us to change our development approach at ID Atlas. We have been phasing out Storyline as our default tool for a few months now. If a client insists on it, we will absolutely build in it; but now we go into that conversation armed with data. We show them the 4x-8x development tax in time and effort and let them make an informed decision.

For most of our new projects, we’ve transitioned to Parta. Not because it’s perfect, but because it hits our sweet spot at half the price: it gives us the deep visual and responsive control we need in a fast, fully collaborative, cloud-based package. But we’re flexible. We also use Genially for highly visual slide-based projects and Evolve when accessibility is the top priority. We’d happily use iSpring or Coassemble if a project’s needs (like raw speed or a free plan) made sense.

DW: So the big takeaway isn’t to pick the best tool, but to have a bigger, more flexible toolbox?

MS:  Exactly. The real winner isn’t any single platform, it’s the approach. Stop defaulting to Storyline because that’s what we’ve always used. Calculate your actual development tax. Test alternatives. Our data shows you can eliminate 75% of your build time and end up with a comparable final product. That’s not a marginal gain; that’s a competitive advantage. The monopoly only has power if we keep paying rent.

The real goal is to let your design dictate the tool, not the other way around. We’ve stopped defaulting to Storyline just because it’s the industry standard.

We know the biggest barrier for large companies is the perceived friction of transitioning a huge library of legacy courses. But our data shows this barrier may be an illusion. If you have your assets (even from a published course where you don’t have the source file) you can rebuild a 15-minute module in a tool like iSpring or Coassemble in less than an hour. If you have a library of 100 courses, you’re looking at 100-200 hours of work depending on the platform. It’s not nothing, but it’s a manageable, one-time cost to escape a permanent tax on all future development.

That’s why we didn’t just publish a static report. We’ve made everything public at: https://www.idatlas.org/blog/elearning-pain-points

It’s a complete, interactive dashboard with five tabs. You can see the Overall Ratings and click any category to read our full qualitative reviews. You can see the Development Metrics tab for the raw data: the 23,000-action Storyline build versus the 6,500-action Parta build. You can use the Tool Comparison radar chart to see head-to-head. And you can use the Project Showcase to compare the final Bentley and Buick builds side-by-side for yourself.

Maybe the most useful section to readers is the Priority Ranking tab. Go there, move the sliders for what you actually care about, whether it’s Accessibility, Collaboration, or Developer Experience, and the dashboard will instantly re-rank all 10 platforms based on your specific needs and show you the matches and conflicts in your priorities. 

But our research is just the start. It’s also an invitation. We’re actively welcoming peer review. Our entire 20-category rubric and all our project assets are available on the site under a Creative Commons license. We want other designers to use this framework, run their own tests, and challenge our findings.

On the site, you’ll find a Peer Review Toolkit with the complete storyboard and all the assets. You can run your own build, track your time and effort metrics, and then submit your results directly into our Evaluation Form. This form will guide you through the full 20-category rubric and help us build a shared, data-driven understanding of our tools.

Our ultimate hope is that this framework serves as a valuable, living tool for the entire eLearning industry. We want to help all of us make better decisions; not just about the software we buy, but about the designs we’re creating with these tools.

Mike Stein is a professional problem solver, accessibility specialist, and Director of Design at ID Atlas. Connect with him here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikesteindesign/