An agency builds you a course. Then the policy changes.
Outsourcing course development is a reasonable decision and often the right one. The problem is rarely the first version; it is the fourth, when the policy has moved twice and the original team has moved on.
What an agency does better
A comparison page written by a vendor is worth nothing unless it concedes something real, so here is ours.
- A good instructional designer brings craft that no tool substitutes for: knowing what to cut, how to sequence a difficult concept, and when an activity is doing real work rather than decorating a slide.
- Agencies give you capacity without headcount, which matters when the workload is lumpy and you cannot justify a permanent hire.
- They bring an outside perspective, which is genuinely valuable when your internal material has accumulated assumptions nobody notices any more.
- For a flagship course where production values are part of the message, an agency will beat anything you generate.
Where the two actually differ
| Kre8AI | an agency | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first draft | An afternoon, in your own workspace. | Weeks, after scoping, briefing and scheduling. |
| Cost per course | Generation credits. A 40-slide course with 20 activities is around 50 credits. | Project fees scaled to designer days, typically an order of magnitude more. |
| Instructional craft | Structured generation with a Bloom-tagged assessment, but the judgement is yours to apply in the edit step. | A trained professional exercising judgement throughout. |
| Updating after a policy change | Upload the revised document and regenerate the affected modules. Editing costs nothing. | A new statement of work, or an unbudgeted change request. |
| Where the knowledge ends up | In your team and your workspace. The next course is easier because you built the last one. | With the agency. Their familiarity with your material is an asset you rent. |
| Source confidentiality | Your documents stay in your tenant. Isolation and retention are described on the security page. | Source material is shared with an external organisation under whatever your contract says. |
| Provenance and audit trail | Per-slide citations and a recorded approval trail. | Depends entirely on the agency's process. Rarely produced as a deliverable. |
| Production polish | Consistent and on-brand, within a fixed course template. | Bespoke, and at the top end considerably more polished. |
| Throughput | Limited by your team's review capacity. | Limited by budget and the agency's availability. |
Which one you should actually use
Choose an agency when
The course is strategic, externally facing, or unusually hard to teach, and the production values are part of what it has to achieve. Also when you have no internal L&D capacity at all, in which case a tool does not solve your problem, because someone still has to make the decisions.
Choose Kre8AI when
You have a backlog of courses that are largely determined by documents you already own, an internal person who can shape and approve content, and a need to keep those courses current rather than shipping them once.
The pattern we see most is a team using an agency for one or two flagship courses a year and drowning in the mandatory ones in between. Those mandatory courses are where a document already dictates most of the content, which is precisely the work worth bringing in-house.
Questions about the comparison
Does this replace our instructional designer?
Can our agency use Kre8AI on our behalf?
How do we know the output is instructionally sound?
What about the courses our agency already built?
This page was last reviewed for accuracy in July 2026. If anything here about another product is out of date or unfair, tell us and we will correct it.
Do not take a comparison page's word for it.
Click through a real Kre8AI course, or download the SCORM package and load it into your LMS. Both take less time than reading a vendor's opinion of a competitor.
Other comparisons: Articulate Storyline, ChatGPT with Rise, outsourced instructional design.