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Kristina SchulzUpdated 2 years ago

Free screencasting and eLearning software

ActivePresenter is a free professional screencasting and eLearning software that is excellent for creating software demonstrations, software simulations, and quizzes. With ActivePresenter you can easily record your computer screen, create software tutorials, edit and annotate screencasts or design eLearning materials. You can then quickly publish your creation to the web, desktops, and mobile devices.

Is ActivePresenter free to download?

ActivePresenter is free for personal and non-commercial use, although some of its features are limited in the free version. It does, however, offer final videos in HD and without watermarks, so this version is often sufficient for users, especially those who are just beginning to create interactive digital material.

For experienced users who wish to unlock all the rich features of ActivePresenter, or use it in a professional capacity, there are various paid-for licenses available.

The ActivePresenter software is available for Microsoft Windows including Windows 11, and macOS X. It is developed by Atomi Systems and is available in a range of languages including English, French, Polish, Vietnamese, Russian, and German.

Alternatives to ActivePresenter for professional screen capturing include SnagIt, Camtasia, Obs Studio, and iSpring Free Cam. Free options include VidShot Capturer, Showmore - Free Screen Recorder, Free Screen Recorder, and Cam Studio. Adobe Captivate, meanwhile, is specifically designed for creating eLearning content. For basic presentation and slide creation, Microsoft PowerPoint is still a popular choice.

What can I do with ActivePresenter?

ActivePresenter is a free screen recorder and screencast video editor with all the tools you need for recording your screen and creating attractive screencast videos. With its fast, smart screen capture technology, it records your screen in crystal-clear quality and cleanly captures system audio and audio from external devices.

With ActivePresenter, making a professional screencast or a training video is relatively straightforward. You can record what is happening on your screen, edit the content and then export it into various formats, including JPEG and PNG images, HTML slideshows, PDFs, Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint presentations, interactive simulations, and a choice of video export options (AVI, MP4, WMV, and WebM). The software even supports lossless codecs in MKV format.

You can also enhance your screencasts or eLearning creations with voiceover, callouts, annotations, videos, and graphics. To make sure your audience is really engaged in your content, you can also make your screencasts interactive by adding application simulations, branching scenarios, and quizzes.

All these features make ActivePresenter a good choice for educators and trainers who need to prepare materials for corporate training or similar. Other uses include creating gameplay videos or conference material.

If you are producing e-Learning materials and educational technology, ActivePresenter will allow you to pack your output into a Shareable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM)-compliant package to import and use in most Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS).

Because of its focus on more professional utilization, using ActivePresenter does come with a learning curve. If you're proficient at creating screencasts and eLearning content, you'll likely find operating ActivePresenter a breeze. If you're a newbie, you'll want to get to grips with its extensive online tutorials or use the templates available within the program.

Once you've shared your output, you can track and report key metrics so you can evaluate learner performance. This is super useful in determining how effective your content has been.

Create professional training and eLearning videos

Thanks to its mix of recording tools and graphic and audiovisual editing tools, ActivePresenter allows you to develop a wide variety of projects. These can have educational, commercial, advertising, research, or demonstration purposes and cover everything from video tutorials and training, to Gameplay videos and eLearning materials to conference presentations.

Because of its rich features, tools, and options, ActivePresenter does require fairly extensive practice to use effectively. Because of this, it is perhaps better suited to professional users, rather than beginners. Having said that, an extensive collection of online tutorials are available for those who want to master its powerful functionality.

  • Pros

    • Allows you to create responsive content for a variety of devices
    • Extensive range of developer-created tutorials available
    • Can easily convert between several video formats
    • Templates for ease of creation and inspiration
    • Free version offers a lifetime license
    • One year of free upgrades available in paid editions
  • Cons

    • Export options limited to SCORM and PNG and JPEG images
    • Demanding learning curve due to rich features, tools and options
    • Only allows for the import of video files created in ActivePresenter itself
    • High licensing prices compared to other similar software
    • No 4K – the highest resolution available is 1080 Full HD
 0/5

App specs

  • License

    Free

  • Version

    8.2.0
  • Latest update

  • Platform

    Windows

    Other platforms (1)
  • OS

    Windows 10

  • Language

    English

    Available languages

    • English
    • Polish
    • Chinese
  • Downloads

    64.5K

    Last month's downloads

    • 437
  • Size

    58.14 MB

  • Developer

Also available in other platforms

Program available in other languages


Icon of program: ActivePresenter

ActivePresenter for PC

  • Free
  • 4
    121
  • 64.5K
  • V8.2.0

User reviews about ActivePresenter

by Julio Miro

By my experience It deserve one 10 on 10.. I'm working frequently with ActivePresenter for several years, and am very satisfied, with the service that brings to me, and with its operation. By my experience It deserve one 10 on 10.

by Anonymous

Great product - if it worked. Hey, it's free. That is the best that can be said for this product. If I had to pay for it, I would be looking elsewhere. Atomi Systems obviously wants to hook you on the free version, then get you to pay for an upgrade - a valid marketing strategy, especially seeing that the free version is adequate for simple projects. But the free version, which simply unlocks (no re-install) to get the upgraded features, is a poor ambassador for selling the product.It crashes often, sometimes on start-up. No other comments on this issue are necessary. Atomi needs to clean up their code.Before starting, you need to select a capture profile. There are several pre-made profiles, and you can also create your own based on the pre-made templates. Unfortunately, the options are confusing and poorly described in the documentation. Some of the options, such as audible mouse clicks, are grayed out in some profiles, with no obvious reason as to why. Again, the documentation is of little help.The mouse click option comes in for special scorn. This is supposed to create an audible mouse click in the soundtrack when you click the mouse to make it obvious to your viewer that a click has occurred. Unfortunately, this option simply doesn't work. I had to add mouse clicks to every slide by hand. (At least the option was there to do this, but it was tedious and should not have been necessary.)The UI is typical and familiar for audio-video software. That said, the UI will frustrate you. Most items can be dragged and fully adjusted in the time window, but some critical items cannot. One of those critical items is the speed and duration of mouse cursor movement Such items are adjustable only by selecting the item in the time window, then entering the time desired (in milliseconds) using the properties window for that item. Gets the job done, but why can't it be done with the mouse like everything else? Needs work.There are nice spotlight and highlight features, but again these will frustrate you rather than bring a smile to your face. The highlight can fade in and fade out. On the other hand, the spotlight, which is a far more dramatic effect, has no fade option. That makes this effect too jarring to use.In the support forums, many people complain that full motion video capture has poor synchronization between audio and video. I can confirm that problem. I also encountered issues in full motion recording (FMR) mode with having my voice narration and computer sounds drop out momentarily or cut off completely near the time of mouse clicks (which helpfully break the project into editable chunks). Atomi's repeated answer is that your computer isn't powerful enough. If a core i7 can't do it, what can? I wound up recording my project in Auto-FMR mode, which is essentially a series of non-motion screen shots combined with mouse cursor animation.This would be a great product if it worked well. Unfortunately, the frequent crashes and poor UI implementation make this a poor choice. It also suffers from poor documentation. The manual is pretty enough, with nice graphics and obviously produced at great expense. Unfortunately, it is poorly written and lacks critical specific information.If you absolutely have to do your project on the cheap, you can get it done with ActivePresenter. However, if you value your time, look elsewhere. Pros: Great feature set for a free productTypical move / screencasting UI Cons: Frequent crashes (save often!)Poor UI implementationFeature set lacks finishing touchesUltimately frustrating to use

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