Migrating from Articulate Rise to CourseAgent in 10 seconds: what gets converted

If you've built a library in Articulate Rise, the hardest part of evaluating any new platform isn't the new platform. It's the library. Years of subject matter expert input, branded styling, accessibility passes, and SCORM packages already deployed across an LMS - none of that is throwaway.

For a long time, the honest answer to "can I move my Rise courses elsewhere?" was: not really. You could export to SCORM and host the package somewhere else, but the course was frozen. You couldn't meaningfully edit it, translate it, re-narrate it or re-skin it without rebuilding from scratch in the new tool.

That is no longer true. CourseAgent imports an Articulate Rise course as a native, fully editable CourseAgent course - typically in under ten seconds. This piece explains what that actually means in practice, what gets converted, what doesn't, and why this changes the migration conversation.

What "ten-second import" actually does

You export your Rise course in the standard way and upload it to CourseAgent. The platform parses the package, maps Rise's lesson and block structure onto CourseAgent's section types, and re-creates the course as a native edit. Text, headings, images, video and audio assets, knowledge checks, course structure and lesson order - all preserved.

The output is not a static copy. It's a CourseAgent course. Which means from the moment the import finishes you can:

• Edit any section the way you'd edit any other CourseAgent course
• Translate the entire course into 19 languages with one click, included
• Add AI narration in any of those 19 languages, included
• Re-export as SCORM 1.2 or 2004, or publish to the built-in Academy LMS
• Use AI Compare & Update to push only the changed sections to deployed copies when regulations or policies change

Ten seconds is the typical wall-clock time for the conversion itself. The point isn't the speed - it's that the cost of trying CourseAgent against your existing library has effectively collapsed to zero.

What gets converted, and what doesn't

Converted cleanly: lesson structure and ordering, headings, body text, images, embedded video, audio, multiple choice and matching knowledge checks, basic interactive blocks (accordion, tabs, labelled graphics where they map sensibly onto CourseAgent section types), and the overall course metadata.

Converted with sensible mapping: Rise's block library and CourseAgent's section types don't overlap one-to-one. Where Rise uses a block type that doesn't have an exact equivalent, the importer maps it to the closest CourseAgent section type and preserves the underlying content. You may want to review the converted course and choose a different section type in places - this is usually a one-click change, not a rebuild.

Not converted (yet): complex Storyline-style branching scenarios embedded in Rise, custom JavaScript blocks, and a small number of niche Rise interactions that don't have a meaningful CourseAgent equivalent. These are flagged in the import so you know where to look.

In practice, for the standard mix of compliance, onboarding and product training content most L&D teams have in Rise, the conversion is clean enough to publish from immediately.

Why this matters more than it sounds

The single most common objection to switching from Articulate isn't price, feature parity, or AI scepticism. It's library lock-in. "We have two hundred courses in Rise" is a complete sentence in a procurement conversation. It ends the conversation.

A ten-second import doesn't make the new platform better than the old one. What it does is remove the migration cost from the comparison, so the comparison can be about the platforms themselves. And on the platforms themselves, the gaps that matter most are:

• Translation. Rise has no built-in translation. The standard workflow is XLIFF export, send to an agency, import the returned file, repeat per language, per update. CourseAgent translates the full course into 19 languages in one click and the translation is included in the plan.
• Narration. Rise has no built-in narration. You record audio externally and upload it block by block, per language. CourseAgent generates AI narration in any of the 19 languages, in voices you can choose, included.
• AI authoring. Rise AI assists from uploaded source material. CourseAgent generates entire courses from an instructional brief.
• Cost. Articulate AI Teams is around $1,749 per user per year. CourseAgent Professional is £39 per month.
• LMS. Reach 360 is a separate product starting at $3,600 per year. CourseAgent's Academy LMS is included from £49 per month.

If you've already invested in the Rise library and the alternative meant rebuilding it, none of those gaps were enough to make a switch rational. If the library moves across in ten seconds, the maths changes.

A practical way to evaluate it

The lowest-risk way to evaluate this is also the obvious one: pick one Rise course - ideally a multilingual one if you have it - and import it. The free plan covers this. Compare the converted course against the Rise original. Translate it into a language you actually need. Generate narration. Re-export to SCORM and load it into your LMS staging environment.

If that single test course works, the question stops being "should we rebuild our Rise library somewhere else?" and starts being "which courses do we run through the importer first?"

That's a much easier conversation to have internally.

When this isn't the right move

Be clear-eyed about where Articulate is still the right tool. If a significant share of your library is Storyline content with custom JavaScript, complex branching simulations or bespoke animations, that work doesn't move to any AI-native platform yet. The realistic model for organisations in that position is using both: CourseAgent for the eighty per cent of standard content where speed, translation and narration are the wins, Articulate for the twenty per cent where Storyline-level depth is genuinely required.

For pure Rise libraries - which is most teams - the ten-second importer makes the switch a low-risk experiment rather than a strategic commitment.

Try it with one course. The result is the answer.