22 Best Podcast Tools to Produce, Distribute, and Monetize in 2024

Alitu is suited for beginner podcasters who don’t enjoy the technical aspect of the podcasting journey. Its built-in recording studio allows you to record team conversations while tagging speakers in the conversation, making it easy to track the source and make changes.

Alitu’s text-based audio editor lets you edit audio like a text document. By editing the podcast transcript, you can remove irregularities like long pauses and unclear words directly.

Its audio enhancer improves voice quality and removes background noise in podcasts for a clear, pleasant sound. With the episode builder, you can easily drag and drop segments like music intros, outros, and ads to create bite-sized podcast episodes.

With Alitu’s hosting, you can submit your podcast to popular directories like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Pandora or create a free podcast website to point your podcast listeners to.

Alitu Pricing:

Alitu offers 2 pricing plans, costing $38/month for Indie podcasters and $295/month for businesses.

Adobe Podcast is an AI-powered podcast editor that lets you record, edit, and enhance podcasts on the cloud. It is easy to use and, most importantly, gives you access to design on Adobe Express.

Its Podcast Studio captures everyone’s audio as individual tracks in 16-bit 48k WAV. At the same time, Adobe AI removes noises, echoes, and other disturbances from audio recordings and optimizes microphone set-up for the best sound quality.

With every recording, you get automatic transcriptions and a text editor for editing audio transcripts.

Adobe Podcast offers podcast-ready sound collections with intros, outros, transition sounds, and background music that you can add right from the text editor.

Adobe Podcast Pricing:

Adobe Podcast offers 2 pricing plans tailored to creators. The Free forever plan includes speech enhancement, mic checks, and limited studio access, while the Adobe Express Premium plan, at $9.60/month, adds video support, advanced voice editing, full studio access, and all premium design features from Adobe.

Want to know more? Read our Adobe Podcast Full Review.

Descript simplifies audio/video editing and transcriptions for content creators, podcasters, and filmmakers. It offers a versatile two-in-one editor for recording, editing, transcribing, and publishing audio or video podcasts.

Descript Script Editor allows users to edit audio/video files by directly changing the transcript. Users can remove filler words, fix spaces between words, and detect transcription errors. Meanwhile, the Timeline Editor helps shorten word gaps and overdubbing, a practice to regenerate speech using AI voice clones.

Both editors work seamlessly with your text script, so changes in the script sync with audio/video in real-time. Plus, you can collaborate with others on your projects online, like using a shared document on Google Docs.

You can instantly generate subtitles, show notes, transcripts, and short video clips using Descript’s AI-powered toolkit.

Descript Pricing:

Descript offers 3 plans – a Hobbyist plan costing $12/month with limited features, a Creator plan costing $24/month that allows 4K quality video and AI suite and a Business plan costing $40/month that provides 1 TB cloud storage and live collaboration between creators.

PlayHT is an AI-powered voice generator, best used for converting text to speech and voice cloning. It specializes in conversational AI voice models that can replicate human-like voices across 800+ styles and 130+ languages with incredible customizability and control.

PlayHT AI Voiceover studio can create custom pronunciations of acronyms and niche terms in your voice and save them in the pronunciation library for later use. This feature comes in handy when you or your co-hosts fumble or mispronounce some words during podcasts. Now, instead of doing the retake, you correct the disoriented voice with an AI voice.

The audio you create or upload to your PlayHT dashboard is easily distributable across all the major podcasting platforms, such as iTunes, Spotify, and Google Podcasts, to increase the reach of your content.

PlayHT pricing:

PlayHT offers a free forever plan with limits on usage. There are 2 paid plans – a Creator plan at $31.20, that has a 3 million-character limit, and an unlimited plan which is usually $99 but currently available at $29 as part of a discount offer.

We chose Ardour for this list as it is an open-source audio editing app for music production and audio editing, allowing editors a lot of flexibility. It supports WAV, AIFF, and FLAC audio formats and provides advanced tools for recording, mixing, and mastering audio.

Ardour’s makes organizing and mixing multiple bite-sized clips from various overlapping tracks very easy through its flexible recording feature. It also gives users access to thousands of clips and jingles via freesound.org.

Ardour also has a powerful automation system that automatically records movement or uses specific data points to perform similar actions. Additionally, It supports VST, AU, and LADSPA plugins, allowing users to expand its functionality with third-party effects and instruments. Its Ripple, Slide, and Lock technology make it easy to edit multi-track audio files without destruction.

Audacity is a free and open-source audio editor and recording app for beginners and experienced podcasters, and makes it into this list as it has a very easy-to-use interface for beginners.

Audacity is native to your local system and runs on all major operating systems—Windows, MacOS, and Linux and supports various audio formats, allowing you to convert WAV to MP3, Ogg, and more.

Using the desktop app, you can record live audio through a microphone or upload digitized records and audio files for editing.

Audacity offers basic editing functions such as trimming or deleting audio, removing silences and noises, and visualizing audio using different tools like Spectogram View and VAMP analyzers.

Audio.com, the online companion to Audacity, is a free sound hosting platform that lets you collaborate on projects, create versioned backups, and easily publish your work produced on Audacity.

Hindenburg is explicitly designed for pro-level audio editing. Its plug-and-play auto-leveler recognizes your podcasting gear, such as microphones and headsets, and equalizes audio levels from the get-go, eliminating repeated set-up.

Hindenburg Pro offers audio fine-tuning through Voice Profiles, which automatically sets an EQ based on your desired sound and tempo for each new podcast episode recorded on the app.

The Hindenburg manuscript editor allows users to trim recordings from transcripts. Users can also add multiple tracks, effects, music, ambiance, and soundbites. The Magic Levels feature allows for automatic bleed removal and adaptive leveling for multi-track recordings.

Use its secure offline transcription engine to transcribe complete or selected multi-track recordings in multiple languages and split them by speaker without needing the internet.

Riverside is a popular tool for recording high-quality video remote interviews and podcasts, even with poor internet connections. It records in 4K resolution and is great for live interviews and webinars.

Riverside allows users to record HD podcasts with pristine sound quality regardless of device type and without an internet connection while facilitating real-time collaboration with co-hosts, editors, and guests.

Use Riverside’s user-friendly editor to combine and customize audio, trim clips, and incorporate branding into podcasts.

Riverside AI-powered toolkit helps you generate transcripts in 100+ languages and repurpose audio content for marketing or social media sharing, such as creating bite-sized social clips, captions, overlays, and more.

Riverside Pricing:

The Free plan covers the basics with 720p recording, magic clips, and video calls. The Standard plan, at $15/month, allows 4K recording, watermark-free exports, and live-streaming. For $24/month, the Pro plan offers AI transcription, live chat support, show notes, and a teleprompter, making it perfect for professional creators.

SquadCast is a cloud recording studio that lets you record high-quality audio and video podcasts. Its remote recording studio can accommodate up to nine guests with real-time editing of audio recordings.

The Dolby-powered Audio Mixer automatically cleans and processes audio recordings, making high-quality audio files available in WAV and MP3 formats. Co-hosts can use the green screen to adjust appearance, check equipment, and test audio and video before recording.

SquadCast’s proprietary ‘Progressive Uploads’ technology auto-saves your audio/video recordings locally and on the cloud in real time. So, a cloud backup is always available, even if there’s a complete power loss.

The backstage management tools allow you to assign roles and permissions to hosts, producers, and guests. The in-app chat facilitates creating chat groups with the backend team and on-screen guests for seamless collaboration.

SquadCast Pricing:

SquadCast has a free forever plan with limited features. The Hobbyist plan costs $12/month/user and lets you export watermark-free videos. For professionals, the Creator plan offers unlimited integrations and Advanced AI Suite at $24/user/month.

Zencastr offers remote podcast recording with 4K resolution and high-quality audio. Hosts and guests can join and be recorded through a simple link without the need for extra software or hardware. We chose Zencastr as it allows users located in multiple locations to easily collaborate and produce podcasts even during a network failure with its local recording option.

iOS users can use Zencastr mobile to record audio/video podcasts on their devices. It offers additional controls for white balance, flash, and zoom.

Zenscastr’s AI-driven ‘Active Speaker Detection’ ensures smooth transitions between speaking participants in live recording, making your podcasts more dynamic and saving editing time for multi-participant conversations.

With ZenAI, you can automatically refine your recordings for awkward silences, pauses, and jargon. It offers instant transcriptions for recordings, with a text-based editor to cut and trim unnecessary jargon, pauses, and filler words from your audio.

To stay on-brand, Zenscastr lets you add custom backgrounds and unique identifiers, such as signatures or brand logos, to your videos.

Zencastr pricing:

Zencastr has a free trial on all 3 of its plans. The Standard plan costs $18/month, the Grow plan offering additional customization options and 4K quality video costs $24/month and the Scale plan that offers role-based access control and advanced analytics costs $40/month.

Auphonic is AI-powered audio editing software. It features fine-grained algorithms that automate audio mastering and podcast post-production tasks.

Auphonic applies machine learning to fine-tune your podcast audio and customize output files. Its intelligent leveler improves audio quality by balancing speaker levels and using loudness normalization.

You get a suite of configurable AI tools for noise reduction, filtering, loudness specifications, transcriptions, and more post-production tasks.

Auphonic’s Zapier integration makes it easy to integrate third-party services. For example, you can download podcast files from various cloud storages, such as Google Drive and Dropbox, or auto-publish podcasts to multiple platforms, such as YouTube, PodBean, Soundcloud, and Facebook.

Auphonic pricing:

Auphonic has a free forever plan that offers noise leveler, silence remover and AutoEQ Filler. For advanced features such as multilingual speech recognition, API access and batch production, you may choose the Recurring plan that costs $11/month.

Trinity Audio features AI-powered tools to create smart audio experiences for podcast listeners to improve engagement. Its Trinity Player sticks at the top of your articles or blogs and allows readers to listen to your content.

Trinity Audio’s robust text-to-speech conversion supports converting textual content in 140+ languages and accents. You can choose between AI voices, styles, and lexicons.

Use Trinity Pulse to display bursts of your top trending audio content, which will be featured as an engaging playlist on your website.

You can distribute the content via leading streaming audio platforms (Spotify, Google, and Apple podcasts) and smart speakers with a click.

Trinity Audio Pricing:

The basic plan costs $15.75/month and supports over 50 languages with limits on Lexicon usage. The standard plan offers full access to Lexicon and offers a more extensive voice style option, advanced reporting and playlist management. The advanced plan supports 140+ languages and access to reporting API.

Telbee is a web-based online voice messaging app that lets you communicate with your podcast listeners by receiving and sending voice messages.

Telbee allows your audience or guests to record questions, stories, and suggestions to use on air. It’s as easy as setting up a voice recorder as a floating button or tab on your website for easy access to your audience.

Instead of juggling between social media platforms and emails, Telbee lets you manage, categorize, and assign voice messages from a dedicated voice inbox.

Telbee’s automatic transcriptions allow you to listen and read voice messages simultaneously. Built-in voice analytics understands the context and emotion behind messages to generate actionable insights from voice notes.

You can send one-off or bulk replies in your voice and attach text and links to voice notes just as you do with emails. You can use its Chrome extension to record and listen to audio recordings over any web app.

Telbee Pricing:

Telbee offers 3 plans – a free plan with limited features, a starter plan at $13.50/month and a pro plan at $22.50 per month that allows unlimited transcriptions.

Transistor integrates well with other podcast apps, search indexes, and aggregators and can automatically transfer podcast episodes to YouTube and X (formerly Twitter). It is therefore one of the best tools for podcast distribution.

Transistor is also an independent podcast hosting platform, allowing you to host public and private podcasts with in-app analytics and insights to track performance over time.

You can embed a customizable podcast player on your website. Or, use Transistor’s web page builder to create personalized landing pages for your podcasts that redirect and link to your preferred apps (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Overcast, etc.).

Transistor provides an AI-powered transcription tool to generate accurate and detailed multi-speaker transcripts for your audio/video podcasts. Each transcript accompanies speaker identity, timestamps, and multiple downloading options.

You can monetize your podcast by automatically inserting audio or announcements at the beginning, middle, or end of your podcast episodes with its Dynamic Ads Insertion (DAI) tool.

Transistor Pricing:

Transistor offers 3 paid plans – Starter plan at $19/month, Professional plan at $49/month if you need to monetize your podcast and Business plan at $99/month to be able to use the DAI feature.

Spotify for Podcasters provides free, unlimited podcast hosting on Spotify. It includes an in-app recording studio to capture audio from various devices. You can invite co-hosts, guests, or fans to join in the episode for a conversation.

Spotify for Podcasters lets you explore new podcast formats, like video podcasts and music + talk shows (a Spotify exclusive).

The podcast analytics tool gives you insights into your audience. While most podcast tools provide analytics, Spotify delivers deeper insights on total plays, unique listens, audience size, and demographics.

With Spotify being the market leader in music apps, you get access to its vast audience by hosting your podcasts on this platform, that too for free!

Castos is a comprehensive podcast hosting and distribution platform that simplifies the process of creating, managing, and growing a successful podcast. it provides a straightforward process for uploading and managing podcasts, for both beginner and experienced podcasters.

Castos offers powerful tools for podcast distribution, allowing users to easily submit their shows to popular platforms such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and more. It enables brands to grow their audience through public podcasts and to provide exclusive content to their premium members through private podcasts.

In terms of analytics, Castos pulls data from multiple listening platforms into a unified analytics dashboard with insights into podcast performance, including listener demographics, episode downloads, and subscriber growth.

Apart from membership subscriptions, Castos offers various ways to monetize your podcasts, such as Dynamic Ad Insertion and One-time or recurring donations.

Castos pricing:

Castos offers 3 plans. The Essential plan offers unlimited uploads and downloads, transcripts and listener analytics, and costs $19/month. The Growth plan costing $49/month offers a dedicated mobile app for private broadcasting, video publishing to YouTube and headliner audio integration. The Pro plan costs $99/month and offers priority technical support, advanced analytics and customizable reports and supports up to 500 private subscribers.

Buzzsprout streamlines your podcasting workflow by having everything you need to host, promote, and track your podcast. It helps you list your podcast in top podcast directories, such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podcast Index, Amazon Music, YouTube, and others.

Buzzsprout Magic Mastering technology automatically sweetens uploaded audio files and optimizes them to match industry best practices for spoken word or music-heavy productions.

Buzzsprout’s Automatic Episode Optimization feature enriches your audio files with the correct specifications for each platform. You can also embed a podcast player on your website with basic functions like rewind/forward and social sharing via X, Instagram, or Facebook.

Buzzsprout’s robust analytics and statistics show stats like total downloads, what channels or apps people are using, and where people are listening to your podcast.

Buzzsprout pricing:

Buzzsprout has a Free Forever including hosting for 90 days, advanced stats, and team collaboration. For $12/month, the Paid Tier 1 plan provides indefinite hosting, unlimited storage, and optional tools like Magic Mastering. At $18/month, Paid Tier 2 adds a hosted website, premium content publishing, and expanded upload limits.

Blubrry PowerPress is the top podcast publishing plugin for WordPress. It supports importing and migrating podcasts from other hosts, uploading audio files, adding show notes, and customizing episode metadata.

Blubrry PowerPress also offers advanced features such as support for multiple podcast feeds, custom embedded players, podcast-specific SEO tools, automatic episode publishing, and detailed analytics.

Blubrry PowerPress provides tools to create a dedicated subscribe page and a mobile-optimized sidebar widget to help grow your podcast audience.

Its Podcast AI Assistant (PAI) streamlines podcast processes—from production to distribution. Use it to generate intelligent episode topics, guest questions, bios, transcripts, summaries, and even reels and video clips for all social media platforms.

Blubrry PowerPress Pricing:

Starting at $12/month, the Standard plan includes unlimited plays, a free WordPress site, and listener demographic surveys. The Advanced plan ($20/month) adds premium publishing and Podcast AI tools, while the Pro plan ($100/month) features unlimited storage, dynamic ad insertion, and private podcasting.

Podomatic is a mobile-based podcast tool. It offers powerful mobile apps for iOS and Android users to record, publish, and track podcast performance on the go.

With in-app analytics, you can understand how your podcast listeners engage with your podcast using demographic data and analytics on total plays, downloads, apps, devices, directories, and more.

Podomatic instantly submits your podcast to popular podcast directories like Spotify, Apple, and Google Podcasts and social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and more.

Podomatic’s paid plans also offer monetization opportunities with advertising and crowdsourcing (donations).

Podomatic pricing:

Podomatic has a free forever plan with basic editing tools. Its Pro Plus plan costs $9.99/month and offers analytics and monetization options with limited bandwidth. The Broadcaster plan offers unlimited bandwidth and storage and costs $49.99/month.

Apple Podcasts has been pioneering the podcast industry since 2012. If you’re looking for a podcast directory that best serves the Apple ecosystem, this is your tool.

Apple Podcasts gives you the tools to manage, market, and monetize your podcasts to a reputable ecosystem. Promote your podcast with customizable social posts, Apple-branded players, links, and QR codes to reach every one of your fans.

With subscriptions, you can transform your show into a business. Apple Podcasts lets you customize a subscription for the right price, trial, and offering while referring you to podcast experts for guidance on pricing.

Use in-app subscription analytics to learn about your listeners — how they listen, where they hear from, and which episodes they enjoy.

Chartable is one of the best tools that offers podcast analytics and attribution tools to gauge your podcast performance across various platforms, apps, and websites.

Chartable adds a trackable tracking prefix to your RSS feed to track user engagement with your podcast. Alongside, it tracks your podcast rankings and reviews on multiple directories, such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, and Stitcher.

Use SmartLinks to identify which marketing channels drive listeners to your podcast. And SmartPromos to find promotional spots and drop-in episodes on other podcasts.

Chartable also connects analytics from Apple Podcasts analytics, Spotify for Podcasters, and more apps to track relationships between your cross-platform marketing and advertising efforts. You can set up daily or weekly email reports with everything that matters.

Chartable Pricing:

The Indie plan of Chartable is free forever and offers 1 year chart and review history, slack integration and team collaboration tools. The Pro plan costs $50/month and offers unlimited chart and review history, customization options and advanced user permissions. For enterprise users, Chartable offers custom plans that include 2FA, dedicated account manager and in-app analytics.

Podbean is a podcast hosting and monetization platform with a community of over 750,000 podcasts and a growing listener base to showcase your podcast.

Podbean offers a robust mobile app for recording, editing, and publishing podcasts. Simply place your phone in front of you to start recording. You can easily include background tracks, intros, and outro music without any additional equipment. Distribute your podcast to major directories and social media platforms with just one click.

Podbean AI provides tools for noise reduction, audio Leveler, Filtering, and autoEQ, as well as show notes, transcripts, and chapters.

Use live audio streaming to elevate your podcast’s experience. Take listener calls and receive real-time comments. Receive virtual gifts from your audience and earn recurring income from your Fan Club membership.

Even better, you can maximize your revenue potential by choosing from Podbean’s monetization tools, including regular Ads Marketplace, dynamic ad insertion, Apple Podcasts Subscriptions, and patron programs.

Podbean Pricing:

Padbean offers a free forever plan with 5 hours of storage. The Unlimited Audio plan costs $9 per month and the Unlimited Plus plan offering video podcasts costs $29 per month.