Podbean vs show.fm

Podbean is a podcast hosting and publishing service with tools for distribution, audience statistics, monetization, and private or video podcasts. It supports RSS feeds and distribution to major directories. Its iPhone and Android apps cover recording, publishing, statistics, and listening, and episodes can be automatically shared to Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Tumblr, and WordPress. The Basic Free Plan provides 5 hours or 500MB of storage, 100GB of monthly bandwidth, up to three published episodes per day, a 100MB single-file limit, and up to 20 episodes in its RSS feed. Free hosting supports MP3 and M4A files, includes basic statistics, and does not require a credit card to sign up. Paid plans add options such as audio or video publishing, private podcasts, team access, and AI tools for audio optimization, content assistance, transcripts, and podcast creation. The listed Unlimited Audio plan costs $17 a month when billed yearly. Podbean also offers advanced, IAB-certified analytics and monetization features including an Ads Marketplace, dynamic ad insertion, and Apple Podcasts Subscriptions.

show.fm is a podcast operations platform for booking, preparing, publishing, promoting, and coordinating episodes. Booking pages handle time zones, calendar conflicts, intake forms, and confirmation emails, and a confirmed booking creates an episode automatically. Its AI pipeline can transcribe episodes, draft show notes, create social posts, and surface moments for highlights and audiograms. Workflow automations cover reminders, social posts, task nudges, co-host notifications, email, and webhooks. Podcast hosting is included on every plan; feeds use a global edge network, and audio is described as triple-replicated with an external backup. Users can connect feeds from other RSS hosts, and hosting analytics include first-party, IAB-compliant plays and completion data. The maker describes a REST API with bearer-token authentication, JSON, eight endpoints, six webhooks, and HMAC-signed webhooks. Access is listed for web and API. A free plan allows one show and two episodes per month; Creator is $19 a month billed yearly.