50+ Best Instructional Design Software Tools You Should Bookmark

Whether you’re a novice or experienced instructional designer, you need eLearning tools that help you streamline your course building. We’ve made an extensive list of the best instructional design software and resources and, for simplicity, divided it into categories, from authoring toolkits to audio-video software and photo sharing platforms. Check them out or just bookmark this article for future reference.

eLearning Authoring Tools

Course authoring software is the main tool for an instructional designer. With it, you can build engaging interactive courses from scratch or turn existing training materials into eLearning courses. We also put authoring tools first because, among the other software solutions covered in this article, they are the ones designed specially for eLearning.

1. iSpring Suite

iSpring Suite is a fully-stocked toolkit designed to quickly build mobile-ready e-courses in PowerPoint. It allows you to create slides, quizzes, video presentations, screencasts, and dialogue simulations without any special training. With iSpring, you can also convert your existing Word, PDF, and PPT manuals and textbooks into interactive e-books in a couple of clicks.

Cost: $970 (a 1-year subscription to iSpring Quizmaker, iSpring TalkMaster, iSpring Flip, iSpring Converter Pro, iSpring Cam Pro, iSpring Visuals, Content Library, and iSpring Cloud, 1 year of Tech Support and upgrades included). Free 14-day trial.

2. Articulate 360

Articulate 360 is a bundle of nine tools, three of which are made specially for course authoring: Studio 360, Storyline 360, and Rise. It enables you to create any type of learning content, from simple longreads to complex interactive courses.

Cost: from $999/year. Free 60-day trial.

3. Adobe Captivate

Adobe Captivate is a powerful authoring tool which is perfectly suited for building complex interactive courses. It has great capabilities for making interactive videos, Virtual Reality (VR) projects, and software simulations, but comes with a steep learning curve.

Cost: $1,299 (lifetime license). Free 30-day trial.

4. DomiKnow ONE

DomiKnow ONE combines traditional e-course authoring with robust responsive authoring, screen capture, and software simulation into one integrated system. This instructional design software has a Microsoft look, so some options will be intuitive for novice designers, but reviews highlight the limited support offered.

Cost: from $997/year. Free 14-day trial.

5. Lectora Inspire and Lectora Online

Lectora is an old hand in the eLearning field, and their desktop authoring tool has been around for a long time. Not long ago, they also released a cloud-based HTML5 version called Lectora Online, which allows you to create fully responsive eLearning content. Lectora will help you build beautiful courses with media and assessments, but you need to be an experienced instructional designer to work with this tool.

Cost: from $2,495 including 1st Year Maint.

eLearning templates

Creating a unique course from scratch takes a lot of time. To quickly develop interactive and engaging online courses, you can use ready-made eLearning templates. If you’re looking for quality ones, check out the following resources:

6. eLearning Brothers

eLearning Brothers is perhaps the biggest name in the industry when it comes to templates. It has a large and constantly evolving library of 1,500+ eLearning templates including interactions, games, scenarios, quizzes, and layouts. There are also thousands of cutout characters, PowerPoint graphics, stock images, and more.

Cost: $1,500 (annual subscription)

7. Faster Course

Faster Course has an attractive library of templates with a primary focus on Adobe Captivate, Articulate, and Lectora. You just need to download a template, copy and paste in your texts, images, and videos, and publish your e-course.

Cost: $349 per year

8. Rapid eLearning Templates

Rapid eLearning Templates offers full-featured templates for Articulate Storyline and Adobe Captivate. It has a few free downloads as well as a collection of premium templates. You can also order a custom template on this website.

Cost: The price for premium templates starts from $30.

9. eLearning.net

eLearning.net produces high-quality free eLearning templates, graphics, and related services. You can download templates at zero cost, but so far they’re not numerous. The site also offers free sets of illustrated characters.

Cost: free

Mind Mapping tools

While planning an eLearning project, you need to collect your thoughts and brainstorm. Mind mapping is an effective way to take notes of your thoughts and represent them visually. Here we’ll offer you a few mind mapping tools to help you decide which is the right one for you.

10. XMind

XMind is a full-featured mind mapping and brainstorming tool that’ll help you collect your ideas and craft them in a logical structure. You can export your mind map into different formats, including PDF, TXT, HTML, JPEG and more. In addition to the mind map structure, XMind also offers tree, logic and fishbone charts.

Cost: Accounts range from $1.24/ month

Alternative services: Mindmeister, iMindMap, SpiderScribe

Presentation Tools

Presentations and slideshows are one of the most common ways of delivering corporate training. With a strong understanding of instructional design and advanced skills working with presentation software, you can create beautiful and engaging learning materials which will help your learners achieve real results. You probably already know these tools, but we might as well mention them anyway.

11. Microsoft PowerPoint

PowerPoint is the most popular instructional design software that allows you to create and show slides. You can combine text, graphics, and multimedia content to build professional presentations. You can make presentations even more interactive by creating triggers and animation effects, and setting up navigation by using hyperlinks.

Cost: free for personal use

12. Prezi

Prezi is a web-based tool for creating presentations (called prezis for short). It’s similar to Microsoft PowerPoint but has some unique features. For example, you can add 3D backgrounds and import PDF files into your prezis.

Cost: The Standard plan for personal use costs $5/month.

Graphics and Infographics Tools

Visual content is an easy way to enhance eLearning. If you want to spend less time creating graphics or don’t have enough skills to work with complex photo editors like Photoshop, use simple tools that make great visuals without needing any design expertise at all. The nice thing here is that most of them are free.

13. Canva

Canva is a graphic-design tool website. It uses a drag-and-drop format and provides access to over a million photos, graphics, and fonts. The service allows you to create a variety of content types, from social media images to presentations, invitations, and marketing materials.

Cost: free

14. Paint.net

Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for Microsoft Windows. It has an intuitive user interface and a minimum set of features needed for an instructional designer. Paint.NET includes simple tools for drawing shapes, the Gradient tool, the Magic Wand, a lot of special effects, support for layers, and much more.

Cost: free

15. Blipshot

Blipshot is a fast and simple screen capturing tool. It allows you to take a screenshot of a whole webpage in just one click. You can drag and drop the screenshot or right click to save it as a PNG file. This is an extension for Google Chrome that works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Cost: free

Alternative tools: Nimbus, Lightshot, qSnap

16. Figma

Figma is a cloud-based design software. It gives you all the tools you need for the design phase of a project, including vector tools, prototyping capabilities, and code generation. The nice part is that you can share designs with your customers without them needing to download any software to view or edit. Figma is a great solution for advanced instructional designers.

Cost: The Starter pricing plan for individuals is free.

17. Background Burner

Background Burner is a free service to remove the background of any photo with a single click. You don’t need to manually select the background/foreground layers to separate them. The service works 100% automatically.

Cost: free

18. Infogram

Infogram is an easy to use visualization and infographics platform. It has options for creating and sharing beautiful infographics, online reports, digital charts, interactive maps, dashboards, and social media visuals. Infogram has an intuitive drag-and-drop editor that converts users’ data into infographics that can be published, embedded, or shared.

Cost: The Basic plan for personal use is free.

19. Imgflip

Imgflip helps to make static visual design come alive with movement and humor. It’s an easy-to-use tool that lets you create your own GIF images relating to your eLearning content. You can make animated GIFs from video files, Youtube, and pictures.

Cost: free

20. Photocopa

Often a photo or set of photos comprises a theme for an eLearning course, and it’s important to find colors that complement that imagery. You can do this with Photocopa, which creates a palette based on your photos.

Cost: free

21. Comic Life 3

Comic Life 3 is an app for progressive instructional designers who are ready to build eLearning courses in the form of comics. The tool has everything for making stunning comics: fonts, templates, panels, balloons, captions, and lettering art.

Cost: $29.99 (lifetime license)

Image & Photo Sharing Platforms

If you don’t want to create graphics on your own, you can take ready-made pictures from photo sharing platforms. There’s a vast variety of high-quality beautiful images, vector graphics, and art illustrations there, which will help you make your eLearning content more engaging.

22. Unsplash

Unsplash gives you access to thousands of free stock photos with a Creative Commons Zero license. That means you can use the images and edit them for free, without asking permission from the photographer or website.

Cost: free

Alternative services: Pexels, Pixabay, Graphicstock, FreeImages.uk

23. Microsoft Clipart Library

Microsoft Clipart Library presents to you a selection of 40 Microsoft Cliparts. You can choose any clip arts that suit your eLearning courses.

Cost: free

24. Flaticon

Flaticon is the largest resource of free icons available in PNG, SVG, EPS, PSD, and BASE 64 formats. It includes 1,649,000 vector icons. You can edit their size, position, and colors.

Cost: free

Alternative services: The Noun Project, Font Awesome, IconPharm

25. Google Fonts

Google Fonts is a library of 915 libre licensed fonts. All fonts are released under open source licenses, so they’re allowed for both personal and commercial use.

Cost: free

Alternative tools: Freebiesbug, 1001 Free Fonts, DaFont, Font Bundles

Video Tools

Training videos are much more engaging than manuals and even simple slides. With the video creation software listed here, you can record screencasts, talking head videos, and presentations with a voice recording explaining the content.

26. Free Cam

Free Cam is a simple screen recorder for Windows. It provides a full set of features for creating professional video lessons such as selecting a recording area, recording a voice over and system sounds, and highlighting the mouse cursor. You can save screencasts on your desktop or share on YouTube.

Cost: free

27. iSpring Cam Pro

iSpring Cam Pro is an advanced video studio for creating video training. With this tool, you can record professional-looking video courses, how-to videos, and software tutorials. While making video lessons, you may need to add titles, annotate, do voice overs, create a freeze frame, and more. iSpring Cam Pro will help you do all that in the quickest and easiest way possible.

Cost: from $197 (lifetime license). Free 14-day trial.

Audio Tools & Samples

Introducing audio into training is a great way to engage learners and keep them involved in the process. We’ve compiled a few tools that will help you create first-rate audios for your eLearning courses. And as a bonus, we will review a service where you can find free music tracks.

28. Audacity

Audacity is free cross-platform software for recording and editing audio. With this tool, you can record live audio, cut, copy, or mix sounds together, change the speed or pitch of a recording, and much more.

Cost: free

29. Watson Text to Speech

Watson Text to Speech automatically converts written text into natural-sounding audio. This service is a great solution for instructional designers who don’t want to voice over courses themselves or hire a professional voice actor. It’s available in 13 voices across 7 languages.

Cost: You can convert 10,000 characters per month for free.

30. BBC Sound Effects

BBC Sound Effects is a library of 16,000 audio samples, which can be streamed or downloaded in WAV format and may be used for personal, educational or research purposes. Sounds include people walking, a cash register, crowds cheering, a car engine, and much more.

Cost: free

Alternative services: Synthopia, SampleSwap, SampleFocus, FreeSound

Interactive Learning Tools

Game-based learning offers a lot of advantages. This is a motivational, challenging, and fun experience that can hold learners’ attention longer and increase knowledge retention. We’ve collected a list of interactive learning tools which will help you make your training even more effective.

31. Kahoot

Kahoot is a game-based learning platform. It lets you create fun learning games (called kahoots) in minutes. You can make quizzes on any subject in any language. The format is up to you. For example, you can add videos, images, and diagrams to your questions.

Cost: from €7.20 per user/month

32. QuizGame

QuizGame is another instructional design software tool for gamifying training. It offers a few games like Prison break, Do or die, or the Big escape, which can excite learners, create a competitive environment, and manage the learning process in a fun manner.

Cost: upon request

33. Wirewax

Wirewax is a browser-based editor that allows you to transform any video into an interactive experience by easily adding hotspots. Videos play on mobile, tablet and desktop.

Cost: from €51/month

34. Vyond

Vyond lets you create animated video courses. It has a big library of templates, sounds, props, and much more, so you can make your content unique to every situation. To speed up learners’ immersion in the courses, you can use dialogue, lip-sync, and realistic movements.

Cost: from $49/month or $299/year per seat

Survey Tools

Survey tools are crucial for user research before and after course creation. The pre-training survey can help define the learning goals and understand learners’ expectations. The post-training survey is a final step that will help you identify which activities learners enjoyed most, what they struggled with, and how much they learned. If you have an authoring tool, you can create surveys right in your course builder. If not, you may use one of the following tools:

35. Surveymonkey

SurveyMonkey is online cloud-based software that allows you to launch different kinds of questionnaires. You can use standard templates or create customized surveys, send them to your learners and monitor the results in real time.

Cost: free Basic plan

Alternative Tools: Google Surveys, Typeform, Zoho Survey, Survey Planet

PDF & Flipping Book Tools

PDF documents are not always designed to be compatible with screen readers. It’s a good decision to turn them into a page-turn experience. PDFs will automatically adapt to screen size and orientation, and it’s easy to read them on tablets and smartphones.

36. Flipsnack

With Flipsnack, you can start making your own flipbook with a simple PDF upload or choosing and editing a template. There’s also an option to create a flipbook from scratch. Flipsnack allows you to add interactive items and customize your designs.

Cost: free

37. SmallPDF

SmallPDF is a platform for converting and editing PDF files online. You can convert Word, PPT, and Excel files to and from PDF, compress, remove pages, add text, shapes, images, and annotations, extract images, and more.

Cost: $6.00/month per user

Writing Tools

An eLearning course is not just about design and interactivity. High-quality content is based on some story that helps to create an immersive learning experience. So text is another important part of a course which hasn’t lost its shine amidst graphics and media. We’ve collected a list of several useful tools which can help instructional designers write texts and make them better.

38. Grammarly

Grammarly is an online platform that will help you make your writing clear and mistake-free. It automatically detects grammar, spelling, punctuation, and style mistakes. It’s available via a browser extension for Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge.

Cost: Critical grammar and spelling checks are available in the free account.

39. Hemingway

Hemingway is an online editing tool for making writing bold and clear. It checks the text for readability and helps you find complex sentences and phrases, excessive adverbs, and passive voice constructions that you can turn into active voice.

Cost: free

40. Google Docs

Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, and Google Forms are a part of an office suite. It has smart editing and styling tools to help you easily format text and paragraphs. You can choose from hundreds of fonts, add links and images, and more.

Cost: free

Project Management Tools

Whether you’re an independent instructional designer or part of a large team, you’re likely to need some tools which will help you be more organized and productive. We’ve made the task easier and by drawing up a short list of such tools. Check out what’s special about them, and find a solution that meets your requirements.

41. Trello

Trello is known for visualizing project tasks. It includes boards, lists, and cards that help you organize your project and track all its aspects in a quick visual way. The tool seamlessly syncs between devices, so you can use it wherever you go.

Cost: free for personal use

42. Google Calendar

Google Calendar is a time-management and scheduling calendar service. It allows you to easily keep track of your daily schedule by creating tasks, reminders, and events. You can share your calendars with others and even create team calendars.

Cost: free

43. Tomato Timer

Tomato Timer is an online Pomodoro Technique timer. The Pomodoro Technique uses a timer to break down work into 25-minute intervals (pomodori), separated by short breaks. It’s based on the idea that frequent breaks improve mental agility. Tomato Timer lets you set custom times, audio tone and volume.

Cost: free

Tools for Communication and Sharing

Some instructional designers work remotely, as well as asynchronously or in different timezones with their customers. The designer and customer should always keep in touch so projects don’t go off the rails. You can easily do that by using the following communication tools:

44. Skype

Skype allows audio and video calls and messaging between multiple devices. You can also easily share presentations or anything on your screen during a call, record Skype calls and use live subtitles to read the words that are spoken.

Cost: Essential features are free.

45. Slack

Slack is a collaboration tool used by remote teams. It supports direct messaging and group messaging, as well as audio and video conferencing. One of its outstanding features is an advanced search engine. You can search everything within the message threads and documents to quickly find the information you’re looking for.

Cost: free for small teams

46. GoToMeeting

GoToMeeting has everything to host a web meeting well. You can launch a meeting from anywhere, on any device. It also has some other features such as the ability to hand over control of your computer and one-click recording.

Cost: The Starter plan costs $14/month for 10 participants.

47. Google Drive

Google Drive is a safe place for storing files and putting them within reach from any device. It allows users to store files on Google servers, synchronize files across smartphones and computers, and share documents. You can easily invite others to view, edit, or leave comments on any of your files or folders.

Cost: The first 15 GB of storage is free with a Google account.

Inspirational and Educational eLearning Resources

In addition to instructional design software tools, you’re likely to need resources for inspiration. Fortunately, you’re not alone! Here are three online resources that you’d better bookmark if you’re looking for inspiration and want to develop your instructional design skills.

48. eLearning Industry

eLearning Industry is a comprehensive blog about digital learning and instructional design. It offers a lot of interesting and thought-provoking articles on eLearning trends, strategies, and software, free eBooks, and webinars.

Cost: free

49. The eLearning Guild

The eLearning Guild is another website where digital learning professionals can share their knowledge, expertise, and ideas to build better training experiences. The Guild hosts several conferences, including DevLearn, Learning Solutions, and Realities360.

Cost: free

50. CommLab India

CommLab India is a global leader for rapid eLearning solutions. It offers a lot of useful instructional design specific tips, tricks, and advice.

Cost: free

All of these tools and resources together will get you creating eLearning courses faster and make them more beautiful and engaging.

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