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Nowadays, it’s possible to create high-quality, professional-looking interactive stories for free or at a relatively small price thanks to a wide array of storytelling tools.

We delved into the wealth of apps and software that are available online to bring you the “crème de la crème”.

The plan was to come up with a variegated offer that would cover all the crucial fields of current storytelling, from maps to video games, from advertising to journalism.

1) Eko Studio (Desktop, Free)

Eko Studios is an authoring suite that can help you tell an interactive story with plenty of narrative gimmicks, such as the possibility to make choices on behalf of the characters. Moreover, it offers a brief online guide book to build a solid interactive narrative construction.

If you want to see Eko Studio running on all cylinders do check out their original productions like Timeline or Wizard School Dropout.

2) Klynt (Desktop, Paid but there’s a free trial)

Klynt is a tool developed to create interactive web documentaries, reportages and the like.

It has a steep learning curve but the price you have to pay to get it (a few hundred bucks) is a big incentive to not give up. The good news is that there’s a 14-day free trial.

3) Storymap (Desktop, Free)

Storymap is a mapping tool developed by the Northwestern University’s Knight Lab, a team of technologists and journalists that aims to innovate news media.

Creating location-based narratives is becoming more and more common for journalists and Storymap helps you do just that.

Besides maps, you can use the tool also to tell a story through any (hi-res) image. You could, for example, use it to make Seurat’s painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte navigable. You could tell stories about each character in the painting and allow users to zoom in-and find out more about the smallest details in the image.

4) Wirewax (Desktop, Paid)

Wirewax brands itself as “the smartest way to create interactive, shoppable and e-learning videos.” So, yes, it’s more commercially-oriented than other tools on this list.

With it, you can make your videos interactive with clickable hotspots (read: shoppable content), branching options and 360 panoramas.

Wirewax is a professional tool and it’s priced as such, but if you need to make a commercial interactive video, it’s probably the best pick.

5) Inklewriter (Free)

Inklewriter is an open-source tool to create interactive fiction with branching storylines. If you want to try your hand at story-driven video games this is a good place to start!

Inklewriter is intuitive, easy to launch and free and that makes it the perfect pick to conclude this list.