The 11 best podcast hosting companies to use in 2023
You need a podcast hosting provider to deliver your content and keep track of who’s listening. These are the only podcast hosts currently worth considering.
The list is still evolving, so if you don’t see a name here you’re expecting, it might just not have been added to the list yet.
I don’t personally endorse every host and I haven’t used them all, but I’ve only added services I have some level of knowledge about.
In this list
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I migrated a few of my personal podcasts over to Fireside, and either I clogged up the system or I was unlucky, as I ran into speed issues and timeouts early on. Since that initial burst of activity, I’ve had no issues with the service.
However, there are elements of the CMS’s design that, as a recovering web developer I understand, but as a user are cumbersome and involve lots of repetition. For example, you can’t add a guest to an episode as you’re uploading. You have to upload your episode, then go elsewhere to create the guest bio, save them, then either select the episode they appear in or go back to the episode you were editing. Stuff like that is user-interface 101, but if you don’t use features like that, it won’t get in your way.
I’d like to see lots more customisation of the website the service generates. I’m delighted with the content, the blog, the fact I can create arbitrary pages and redirect one address to another, but there are only two or three themes, and they all pretty much look the same.
Overall, Fireside is solid, and for many of us, that’s what we need. If you’re intending to run your own website for your podcast, there are probably more cost-effective solutions, but if you want to keep everything in one place, Fireside is a great fit… just don’t expect your podcast website to look sexy.
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Given my previous history as someone who ran a hosting company, I’m somewhat choosy about the services I use.
While Podcode.tv and The Iceberg (my email newsletter, now called the Podcode Briefing) were separate offerings, each had its own podcast, so I wanted to use a service that had an attractive embedded player, and that wouldn’t charge me to create multiple series. I knew I wouldn’t be expecting to hit a high download limit, so Transistor felt like an easy decision since I knew the chaps already, and liked them.
As I said in the description, setting up a new feed really is lightning fast, and you can submit your new show to directories quickly and effortlessly. Uploading audio and artwork is easy, and the interface puts all the fields in the right place.
I’d prefer a text editor based on Markdown rather than the slightly outmoded rich text box, as pasting into those kinds of fields can lead to sloppily-formatted show notes.
The bundled podcast website isn’t good enough for production, but you don’t have to enable it, which I think is smart. If you’re running your own website, it’s easy to paste in the permalink to an episode, so listeners tapping it in the show notes will be taken to your canonical home for each episode.
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Toys like the recording app and their previous deal with Apple that flooded podcast directories with test shows have given Anchor a bad rep among many podcasters, or probably more accurately, among those whose job depends on having a poor opinion of Anchor (which was once me). That said, I think they’re misleading podcasters and helping to foster a monetisation-first strategy – rather than a quality-first one – by encouraging new podcasters to advertise Anchor on their shows. No-one’s listening to those shows so it’s not creating an industry-wide problem, but it teaches bad habits and fosters the idea that monetisation is the first goal of a podcast, rather than creating something that is of value to its audience.
I have a couple of podcasts on Anchor that I want to preserve, and for that, I can’t fault it. I also have clients who use the service, because – as mentioned in the description – its simplicity and lack of features make it valuable to those for whom podcasting is only a small part of a much wider media offering.
It has a friendly, modern interface which is easy to use and difficult to get lost in. The webpage it produces for podcasts is OK, but no substitute for a real podcast website.
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Full disclosure: I used to run a podcast hosting business, which sold to Castos in the spring of 2021. I use Castos and like it, but I’m in no way affiliated with the company, and have no incentive to write them a glowing review. Of course you don’t have to believe that. 🙂
If I were a hardcore WordPress user like back in the day, I suspect Castos would have been my default choice. I loved and used to heartily recommend the Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin, before Craig and the Castos team acquired it. Had I not been building my own solution, I probably would have migrated my shows to Castos, but I was a little ahead of them at the time.
I’m going to hold off on reviewing individual features as it’s still too close to the Podiant acquisition for this kind of breakdown to be of value. Different people have differing needs, but the bottom line is that Castos is a great choice – like some of the others I’ve reviewed – if you’re already taking care of the website elsewhere, and especially if you run WordPress. If you don’t run WordPress, Castos gets a star knocked off because you can’t give each episode a custom permalink, meaning in-app listeners will always be taken to your Castos-hosted website (which isn’t great).
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It’s early days for the product so much of what I’m saying I hope will change over the coming months.
The service is really easy to get on board with. Setting up a new podcast is a breeze, and uploading episodes and getting code to embed them is easy. There are some minor quibbles with editing text for show notes, but sometimes that’s just about understanding the quirks of each particular site, as everyone does rich-text-editing differently (and few do it right).
What’s clear is that CoHost doesn’t really offer anything to boost a podcast’s visibility than any other host. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice and simple service with much of the right functionality… they’re just not cracking a nut that hasn’t already been cracked by Captivate.
Pricing is going to be a problem for them. I appreciate the simplicity of having one price point, but what they have is a hobby product, despite the “Professional” name tag. There’s no team management and you can only have one podcast per account, which effectively makes it an expensive version of Anchor.
Again, they’ve only just launched so this may change, but they’ll need to work hard to justify $60 a month per podcast.
I’m impressed with the quality of the AI-powered transcript. It shares a struggle common to other services in that it always mis-attributes the last word in a sentence, and it hasn’t got a handle on punctuation yet. But I’m judging it by Descript‘s standards, which isn’t fair since that’s almost literally their entire job.
You kick off the transcription process by assigning the number of speakers, wait in a queue and then make your hand-corrections. It needs some work to make speeding through the transcript easier, but assigning speaker labels is easy, and it coped well with background music.
The website CoHost provides each podcast is plain and simple, which is usually the best way to go. You won’t win points for originality, but you will end up with a navigable site with buttons for following the podcast in your listeners’ app of choice. I could complain about “missing” features like mailing lists, but that doesn’t seem fair this early on.
What is a concern though is that there’s no custom domain provision, which basically makes the website a moot point, since it’s vital podcasters build their websites on land they own. (What I mean here is that your website address would end with a .com address that isn’t under your control.) I hope and I’m sure they’ll fix it soon, but I think it’s a mistake to launch a website provision without the ability to set your own domain.
In conclusion then, CoHost looks to be a fine enough product, but with nothing – bar transcripts – to differentiate it. I understand the Quill team might have a particular workflow and built the UI to match it, but I’m not seeing anything here that isn’t offered by other services, at a far cheaper price, and with more expertise.
If you’re looking for a media host built by someone who understands the day-to-day process of production, check out Fireside.fm.
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I was a Pinecast user in the early days, liked the service, and liked Matt, the founder. A good deal has changed since I used it in 2016, but there are still some signs that this is perhaps a software engineer’s product, rather than a designer’s.
If you know how podcasts and RSS feeds work, some of the onboarding decisions make sense, however if you’re new to the space, you might find it strange that you need to enter a website address for your podcast, but you can’t create one for your show until you start a paid plan, something you can’t do in the initial onboarding process.
Setting up a tip jar for donations is a simple as entering your bank account, sort code, and chosen currency. Once an episode is uploaded, submitting it to directories that support automatic submission is as simple as flipping a switch.
However, the rest of the user experience is what I can only describe as “fussy”. The UI is consistent but there’s something about the order of operations that doesn’t feel natural, and there are some weird quirks I’m unable to explain. For example, when I published my first episode, my newly-built Pinecast-powered website – which has excellent customisation options and a number of themes – didn’t update.
Pinecast’s pricing model makes it excellent value-for-money, and I like the approach of paying to bolt-on specific features. The interface is clean and not unpleasant; there’s just a feeling that it was designed by someone who has the order of operations clear in their head, but it doesn’t match mine. Maybe it matches others’.
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I use LibSyn, but under duress. I don’t bear them any active ill-will, but we as an industry have moved on, and there’s so much choice that it means companies can compete on ease-of-use, adoption of modern features, education and outreach. They’re putting in as much effort as they can on their new interface, and while it rockets their user experience a decade forwards, it’s still a decade out-of-date.
Of course, design isn’t everything, and people aren’t wrong for choosing LibSyn as a default, because its infrastructure is rock-solid. They’ve long supported dynamic content injection, they offer IAB-compliant metrics (at a price), you can upload content from a variety of sources (including FTP!) and you can push full episodes out to YouTube. They even support private podcast feeds and the ability to attach other things to your RSS feed than just an MP3 file. Their feature set is built up over 16+ years of experience with a variety of user needs, and put simply, when it comes to the tubes and pipes that make podcasts go, they know the landscape hands down.
But if you ever need to look at your stats and understand them, if you manage multiple podcasts and fear uploading to the wrong account (which happens more than you might think) or you want to manage a client’s podcast securely without sharing passwords (you should never share passwords if you can help it), if you want a modern, good-looking website for your podcast or an attractive player to embed into your blog, if you want tools to make it easier to share your content or you just want to be able to publish quickly, there are far better choices you can make.
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The interface is pretty, and the onboarding process is fairly easy with minimal fuss. In many respects, RSS.com is a paid equivalent to Anchor, but with a few added extras, and a focus – obviously, given the name – on podcasting as an open ecosystem.
I was intrigued by a feature in the content management system that prevents malformed RSS feeds from being submitted to directories. It’s the job of a media host to maintain a clean feed, however I thought the idea of checking that a feed works before allowing it to be submitted was a nice touch. However, due to some Internet outages at the time of writing, that part of the service didn’t work, and so I was unable to validate or submit my feed.
As someone who ran a service with a similar pricing structure, I can get behind the pricing. However I know for some, having to pay per podcast isn’t ideal.
I’m always happy to see good-looking, functional, and easy-to-use embed players. RSS.com has a sleek player, but it lacks important things like subscription or sharing buttons from within the player.
For their $12.99 monthly fee, the service is let down by its poor lack of website support. Podcasts don’t have individual websites, just pages at unfriendly addresses beginning with
rss.com/podcasts/. These addresses can’t be changed, and you can’t choose your own custom domain name. Without this in place, they simply can’t justify $12.99 per month.
Mark’s thoughts
8 months, 3 weeks agoI’ve been using and recommending Captivate to clients for six months, and while I would prefer they remove some features and keep their energies focused, my recommendation stands.
For people just starting out, who want to hit the ground running and don’t want to have to overthink their website strategy or how to be listed in every directory, Captivate is a great place to start your journey.
I’d like the websites to be more attractive and/or customisable – maybe with a bit of CSS – so that those who manage podcasts on others’ behalf can make them look prettier. But they present podcasters with the bare bones of what they need to get going, at an unbeatable price.