My most highly used tools are:

1. Adobe Captivate
2. Camtasia Studio
3. SnagIt
4. Atom (Text Editor for JavaScript work with Captivate)
5. PowerPoint (for creating graphics)

The nice thing about using a tool like Captivate is that I can have a ready made - themed template that matches our brand and I can just add the content and interactive elements.

Huge help - You can create WAY more things than the native tools of the LMS will allow.

I cannot imagine working without the tools in my toolbox.

I am always on the lookout for new and interesting things but the items above have stood the test of time for me. (My text editor of choice has changed a bit over time but a text editor has always been on the list).

To add to @gstager‘s list above, which would have been pretty much my answer, I would add WellSaid Labs for audio voiceover on promotional video and eLearning. I know Docebians use Vidyard effectively. 

This might be a bit 20th century of me, but we have users who do like a manual so if you want one that’s quick to produce and easy to customise try Watsonia Publishing who are a leading producer of IT training courseware for corporations, educational institutions and training companies around the world.

Hope that helps, i look forward to other peoples replies.

Our team uses Articulate 360, which includes Storyline (for more advanced topics/developers/course interactions) and Rise (a great quick and dirty development tool)

We’ve been using them exclusively for about 6 years; we’ve used dominKnow and Captivate in the past, but find Articulate far superior.

+1 for WellSaid - Though I do not use text to speech often - WellSaid, in my opinion, has the best sounding options available at the moment.

I am always interested in hearing the reasons others have for finding a particular product superior to the one I use. What feature of the Articulate product do you find most contributes to your point of view?

Our Instructional Design team used Storyline and have started transitioning to Articulate 360 (Rise).Both will take dedicated people with the knowledge of how to use it (or learn it and use it). We’ve offered eLearning and VILTs for over a decade. The biggest benefit of having elearning is it helps alleviate the class load of VILTs. We cap VILTs at 15 people so basic elearning can help people get started until they’re able to get into a VILT. Also, with VILTs that are popular but it’s hard to get them at  times that fill the class (thinking our products for schools where teachers are in class teaching all day) we’ve turned the VILT into an elearning so they can view it in their own time. 

We believe the VILT experience is where the real ROI lives, but understand that some learners prefer doing it in their own time, and it helps meet the needs of our customers, so we offer it. 

Articulate Rise and Adobe Illustrator will get you a long way. Those are the tools I use the most.

Articulate Storyline is a great add-on for Rise, when you need to create more advanced interactions. 

If you are looking to scale and want a reasonably mature cloud based alternative to Rise?
Take a look at EasyGenerator. It is awesome and is growing in the space of pushing to LXPs.

(And shhhh...a little birdy whispered that Docebo is on their list “to push from” from the authoring platform itself at an Enterprise level).

They have made great strides over the last few years and are rated well.

OH - And I wish I could get on soapbox to say that decentralized authoring with SMEs is a very very important concept to scale OUTSIDE of your platform. Scaling by adding powerusers and superusers that will author internal of the platform can cause a trap when you need to migrate content later. Very few platforms support exporting effectively to another platform….so a content trap is a real problem as you scale a decentralized process...let alone learning records that typically migrate easier with reporting.