A Buyer’s Roadmap to Finding the Perfect eLearning Authoring Tool

Unless you’re buying every single piece of learning content from a third party, there will come a time when you need an eLearning authoring tool to help you build your own eLearning content.

Whether it’s for employee onboarding, mandatory compliance training, or software training, your eLearning authoring tool is one of the most important investments you’ll make in your learning technology stack. It allows you to design more engaging, impactful learning and deliver it to the right people faster.

So why does so much of your learning program’s success rely on the course authoring tool you choose? Below, we’ll explore exactly why making the right choice matters, and how to evaluate the tools on the market to find your perfect eLearning authoring tool.

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Why do you need an eLearning authoring tool?

Before you look at product brochures, analyst reviews, or comparison grids, it’s vital to step back and clarify your goals. 

What do you actually need your eLearning authoring tool to do for your organization? What will be most beneficial to your L&D team? And, vitally, what will help you produce the best outcomes based on your learning goals?

Some common goals you may want to achieve with your eLearning authoring tool include:

• Faster content production and management: Do you need to produce learning content quickly and consistently, and manage it across multiple teams and geographies?
• More scalable content production: Is your learning program growing, requiring more robust features for managing and reusing content at scale?
• More flexible production processes: Do you need responsive design, localization, accessibility, or advanced interactivity to meet learner needs?
• Streamlined L&D team collaboration: Will multiple stakeholders – subject matter experts (SMEs), instructional designers, reviewers – need to work together seamlessly?
• Easier integration: Should the tool work smoothly with your existing LMS, LXP, or other platforms?

Defining these priorities will help you filter out tools that don’t align with your needs. Without clear goals, it’s easy to be swayed by flashy features that might not actually solve your organization’s challenges.

Once you know what you need to achieve with your eLearning authoring tool, you’ll have a way to filter out the tools that won’t help you meet these goals. For instance, if you have a large L&D team with lots of contributors and reviewers, an authoring tool that doesn’t support collaboration can instantly be ruled out.

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eLearning authoring tool use cases

Now you know what you need to achieve with your eLearning authoring tool, it’s time to narrow down your search further. 

An easy way to do this is by considering your specific use case, which will often depend on the size and complexity of your organization (the two are usually, but not always, linked). For instance, does your single-sourcing need to manage eLearning alone, or eLearning plus knowledge support, instructor-led materials? Do you have content that is similar but would benefit from unique differences for different audiences? Usually, larger businesses will need to manage a wider range of content that targets multiple audience roles and different delivery modalities, so choosing a tool that supports everything you need will significantly impact efficiency.

So, what’s the best authoring tool for each organizational use case?

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Small organizations and start-ups

Smaller teams often want to prioritize speed and simplicity. They may not need all the bells and whistles, but instead require a tool that:

• Is budget friendly
• Is quick to learn and easy to use
• Provides templates or themes to speed up content creation
• Offers straightforward publishing options to standard formats like SCORM

In very small businesses, there may only be one person on the L&D team, or learning may even be handled by a non-L&D specialist from the HR team. For these businesses, basic cloud-based tools or lightweight authoring solutions can be ideal. They allow non-technical users to create learning content without a steep learning curve.

When the organization grows, you can move up to an enterprise-class system.

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Medium-sized organizations

As organizations grow, their needs become more complex. They might require:

• Greater collaboration features to manage multiple authors and reviewers
• Version control to keep track of edits and updates
• The ability to reuse content across different courses or programs
• Responsive design to ensure content works across devices

At this stage, it’s important to look at more robust authoring tools that balance ease of use with professional-grade capabilities. There will likely be several course authors, SMEs, and reviewers contributing to eLearning content, ensuring content production processes run smoothly.

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Large enterprises

Enterprise-scale organizations typically face challenges of scale, governance, and consistency. Their needs may include:

• Enterprise-level collaboration with role-based permissions
• A centralized content repository to enable content reuse and updates at scale
• Integration with multiple LMSs, LXPs, or other enterprise platforms
• Advanced access permissions for different users
• Advanced analytics and reporting
• Global publishing capabilities, including translation, localization, and accessibility

These organizations often need a full-featured authoring platform rather than a standalone tool – something designed not just for creating content, but for managing it strategically. In many cases, a learning content management system (LCMS) will be a better fit than a standalone authoring tool, as it supports end-to-end content creation, management and distribution processes.

They will also need greater control over their access permissions – in other words, the ability to give the right people the right access to the right content. This ensures the L&D team has more precise learning content management, and avoids accidental edits to the wrong courses.

A general rule of thumb is that the more complex the organization, the more comprehensive the authoring tool will need to be to support the depth and breadth of content needed across the entire business. 

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Key evaluation criteria for choosing your eLearning authoring tool

Once you’ve matched your goals with your organizational context, you can focus on specific features and capabilities. At this point, you can start referring to comparison grids, analyst reviews, and digging deeper into the websites and brochures of shortlisted vendors.

The most important criteria to consider include:

Authoring and learning experience 

• Ease of use: How steep is the learning curve? Will your team need extensive training, or can they hit the ground running from day one?
• Design flexibility: Can you create responsive content that works across devices? Are there templates and themes that make good design accessible to all?
• Content types: Can you create software simulations? Can you gamify your learning? Can you build adaptive testing? Can you build a glossary?
• Accessibility: Does the tool support WCAG compliance to make content inclusive and accessible for all learners?
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Content management and delivery

• Content reuse: Does the authoring tool allow you to reuse assets, templates, and modules across projects, saving time and ensuring consistency?
• Publishing options: Does it support industry standards like SCORM, xAPI, or cmi5? Can you publish once and deploy to multiple systems?
• Translation and localization: Can you easily manage translated eLearning content? Do you need to manage each language version separately, or is there a smarter way to organize your translated courses?
• Version control: Can you track changes, roll back versions, and manage updates efficiently for better control of your learning content?
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Business structure and growth

• Collaboration: Can multiple authors, SMEs, and reviewers work on the same project at the same time? Is there a streamlined review process to reduce delays?
• Price: What’s the total cost of ownership? Can you scale your package up or down as needed? What pricing model do you use?
• Scalability: Does the tool have the infrastructure and features to support the future growth of your organization and learning strategy?
• Support and community: What kind of customer support, training resources, and user community does the vendor provide?
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Each of these areas can have a major impact on your long-term success with the tool, so weigh them carefully against your goals. 

The larger and more complex your organization, the more likely it is that you’ll need to consider more of these criteria. For instance, if you know for sure you only want to publish courses in English and this won’t change in the future, you can safely ignore the translation functionality of the tools you’re considering. 

In other words, only judge your tools against the criteria that matter to you, both now and in the future.

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Mistakes to avoid when selecting an eLearning authoring tool

Many organizations run into difficulties not because they choose a “bad” tool, but because they overlook critical factors during the selection process. Here are some of the most common pitfalls:

• Focusing only on today’s needs: A tool that works for your immediate project may not scale as your needs grow. Think ahead to what your learning program will look like in two to five years.
• Overvaluing flashy features: Flashy widgets and templates can be appealing, but if they don’t align with your learning goals, they may become distractions rather than solutions, without helping you achieve your actual objectives.
• Ignoring the learner experience: Ultimately, your tool should enable you to create engaging, effective learning for your people. Don’t get caught up in backend features at the expense of learner usability.
• Neglecting collaboration: If your team can’t work together effectively within the tool, you’ll lose valuable time and efficiency.
• Underestimating the importance of reuse: Without robust content management, you risk duplicating effort, wasting time, and losing consistency across your programs, as you’ll need to keep recreating almost-identical versions of the same resources.
• Failing to consider customer resources and support: Even the best tool can cause frustration if vendor support is slow or limited. There will always be a time when you’ll need the help of your vendor, so choosing one with minimal or inconvenient support options will hinder your progress.

Avoiding these pitfalls will save time, money, and headaches in the long run.

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How to create a shortlist and ask the right questions in your demos

Once you’ve clarified your goals, reviewed use cases, and outlined evaluation criteria, you’re ready to create a shortlist of tools to explore further. To make the process easier, follow these three simple steps to whittle down your list:

Step 1: Build your shortlist

Building your shortlist should be relatively straightforward. Draw from analyst reviews, customer reviews on sites like G2 and Capterra, and recommendations from your L&D peers, then you can start narrowing down the options according to your predetermined criteria.

First, you can immediately eliminate tools that don’t meet your non-negotiable requirements. No matter how flashy or impressive they look, if they don’t do what you need them to do, they’re not worth considering.

Second, narrow the list down to three to five tools that align most closely with your goals. You can then move ahead with these authoring tools for vendor demos.

Step 2: Prepare for demos

When you schedule demos with eLearning authoring tool vendors, give them scenarios that reflect your actual use cases. This way, you can see how the tool performs in situations that matter to you.

Bring the same scenarios to each vendor to allow you to assess each tool fairly. Based on how each vendor handles these scenarios, one tool may leap out as an obvious frontrunner, but more likely, you’ll need to drill down a little deeper with some questions.

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Step 3: Ask the right questions

In every single demo, you should have the opportunity to ask questions about each course authoring tool. Some useful questions include:

Product-related

• Can multiple people collaborate on a course simultaneously?
• How does the tool handle reviews and updates to shared content?
• What publishing formats and standards are supported?
• How do L&D teams distribute learning content?
• How are accessibility requirements managed?
• What integrations are available? (or, if you need specific integrations, such as with your LMS, “Do you integrate with X?”)

Service-related

• How easy is it for non-technical users to get started?
• How is customer support structured, and what resources are available?
• Do you have a customer community so I can connect with other users?

By testing real-world scenarios and asking pointed questions, you’ll quickly see which tools truly meet your needs, and which only look good on paper.

From demos to product trials

Once you’ve seen the demos, you’ll want to further narrow down your search with a selection of product trials for the frontrunners. 

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This isn’t just to “have a go” with the tools or to get a feel for how they work – it’s to answer very specific questions you may have about the features and capabilities of each authoring tool. You should create a list of specific criteria and scenarios you’ll want to try out in each trial, which you can then share with each vendor so they can guide you toward the best way to accomplish your goals in their tool.

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Emerging trends and future proofing your authoring tool

The course authoring tool market is crowded, and new tools are launching all the time. In order to keep up with the latest technologies and solutions, it’s crucial that you choose a course authoring tool that moves with the times and isn’t stuck in the past.

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Some of the current and emerging trends to keep an eye on include:

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• Cloud-based authoring and review – Virtually all new authoring tools are cloud based, and with good reason. It allows course authors to collaborate in real time for faster, higher-quality outputs.
• Integrations – More course authoring tools are being built to integrate with other systems, such as LMSs, LXPs, or websites. This can make it quicker and easier to manage content from a single location.
• AI-supported content authoring – AI is arguably the most significant trend in L&D today. More and more tools are adopting AI into their course authoring processes, though it’s usually a smarter choice to test your current AI preferred content creation with external tools, as they tend to keep up better with the fast-changing AI trends.
• Interactive learning experiences – “Click-next” eLearning doesn’t cut it for today’s learners. Instead, look for a tool that supports simulations, gamification, engaging assessments, and more.

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Choosing an eLearning authoring tool that’s flexible, scalable, and continuously updated gives you the best possible chance of finding a tool that will grow with you and keep up with industry developments, no matter how learner needs evolve over time. This will help protect you from needing to constantly find and procure new authoring tools, and will support your L&D team in the long term.

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Ready to find your perfect course authoring tool?

If you’ve mapped out your goals, identified your use case, and now you’re building your shortlist of course authoring tools, we’d love you to consider if dominKnow | ONE LCMS is a good fit.

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dominKnow | ONE prioritizes course creator collaboration, content reuse, and easy distribution, making it a great all-rounder for L&D teams at medium-to-large organizations. 

We’d love to show you how easy and impactful course authoring, management, and distribution can be, book your demo today to get started!