The Best Podcast Apps of 2025

Pocket Casts has a beautiful interface, excellent customization options, and a couple of features that I just can't live without. These include Trim Silences, which automatically adjusts playback speed by cutting out silences, and Volume Boost, which increases the volume of people's voices and suppresses background noise. The best part: Pocket Casts offers all these features for free on both Android and iOS. The free tier is quite generous, and includes apps for Mac, Windows, and the web, alongside cross-platform sync, which is fast and reliable.

Paying for Pocket Casts ($40/year) gives you access to its apps on Apple Watch and Wear OS, along with extras such as podcast transcripts, bookmarks, and up to 20GB of cloud storage to upload your audio files. The app also recently got a transcripts feature for Plus subscribers, but you can't tap a line in the transcript to seek to that part of the podcast.

Even though the free tier is generous, Pocket Casts could use better queuing and filtering. It has a good list of presets to let you filter and sort podcasts (eg: downloaded podcasts, sorted by release date or duration), but you can't customize it beyond those presets. Some of Pocket Casts' competitors let you create more granular customizations for podcast playlists and queues.

Platforms: Free on iOS, Android, Mac, Windows, and web; Plus Subscription ($40/year) on Apple Watch and Wear OS.

Apple Podcasts is the dominant podcast player on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and it does a good enough job maintaining that position. It's totally free and has a curated podcast gallery to make it easy to discover new episodes. For most people starting out with podcasts on Apple devices, Apple Podcasts is the place to go. It even has one killer feature that few other apps do—automatic transcripts. 

The app will generate a transcript for the podcast episode you're listening to, and you can then tap any line of text to skip to that part of the episode. It even has a search function for you to quickly find a specific segment of your podcast. Outside of transcripts, there's other neat customization options, including the ability to automatically delete played episodes and change the duration of the skip forward and back buttons.

All of this makes Apple Podcasts a great starter app, but it has more than a few limitations. Its updates are linked to Apple's software update cycle, which means that if something breaks, it may not be fixed until Apple also updates iOS or macOS. The app also doesn't support non-Apple platforms, which will be a turn-off for some. Many other apps let you quickly pull out a snippet of a podcast and share it on social media, but Apple Podcasts doesn't have this feature.

Platforms: iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch

Overcast is fast, endlessly customizable, and collects as little data as possible. Features include Smart Speed, which shortens silences, and Voice Boost, which makes it easier to hear people's voices on podcasts. It also lets you set certain podcasts to download automatically and customize the home screen layout to better suit your needs, which will appeal to a lot of people. I also like its Smart Resume feature, which automatically rewinds the podcast by a few seconds when you resume playback. This helps me quickly remember the context of what I'm listening to as opposed to taking a few seconds to reorient myself.

Overcast is available for free on iOS, Mac, and the web, and it has an optional premium subscription at $15/year if you want to support the app's development. The paid tier removes banner ads and lets you access playback stats and playback history for the past 48 hours. Overcast doesn't have apps for Windows or Android, which is a dealbreaker for some. It's also not the app for you if you value a beautiful design over everything else. The interface is utilitarian, although that's fine by me, since I mostly listen to my podcasts in the background.

Platforms: iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and the web

Podcast Addict is an excellent, customizable Android app for your podcast listening needs. It lets you create custom playlists that group episodes by topic, lets you bookmark parts of an episode for you to revisit later, and has powerful audio effects including Skip Silence and Volume Boost. It also lets you set podcasts as alarms, which is an innovative idea that works very well on Android. It's great for people who love waking up to the sound of their favorite hosts speaking, and it reminds me of the good old days when radios had built-in alarm clocks.

This app lets you review podcasts in the app, and includes 120,000 radio stations and thousands of audiobooks. You can enjoy all of this for free if you're okay with a banner ad on various screens. If you can't stand ads, though, you can pay $1/month or $10/year to remove them. The paid tier of the app also lets you use more app themes and a playlist widget. This isn't the best app for those who need cross-platform support or a stunning interface, but it gets the job done.

Platforms: Android

Castro has a clean interface and is a decent free podcast player. However, all of its best features are only available with the Castro Plus paid subscription ($25/year). With this, you get the ability to sideload any audio file from the web and save it to Castro. This can be really useful if your favorite audio shows aren't available as podcasts. And like other apps, the app can also trim silences and enhance voices.

Castro Plus also lets you automatically skip repetitive chapters from podcasts, which could include introductions, sponsored segments, or topics you're not interested in. The app also allows you to automatically mix podcasts to mono, which can make some shows easier to hear. If that sounds unintuitive, it's because stereo mixes sometimes end up making one guest too quiet and the other too loud, and mixing to mono fixes that issue.

This app doesn't have the ability to generate transcripts, which may be a dealbreaker for some people given that getting the most out of this app means you have to pay for it.