Buzzpsrout vs Captivate: Podcast hosting platform full walkthrough
Here at Bamby Media, we’ve been producing podcasts for clients for almost a decade and I’d say at this point we’ve worked with almost every podcast hosting platform out there.
From Omnystudio to Simplecast, Podbean, Libsyn, Blubrry, Acast there is no shortage of hosts.
But do we really need that many podcast hosts?
Don’t they all largely do the same thing?
The short answer is yes, they do all largely have the same basic functions.
But I do feel that not all podcast hosting platforms are created equally.
There are definite advantages to some hosts over others, and after years of experience in this space, there are two hosts that I’ve found to be the standouts in the field.
Buzzsprout and Captivate.
I’m going to give you the breakdown as to why I’ve chosen these two, and who ultimately wins in a battle between the two.
The Price Point Breakdown
Let's dive straight into the dollars and cents. Captivate starts at US$19 per month for up to 30,000 downloads per month, with unlimited shows and storage. Meanwhile, Buzzsprout's base plan is $12 per month for up to three hours of uploads monthly, but it doesn’t cap your downloads. While Captivate offers unlimited uploads, Buzzsprout gives you advanced statistics at a lower price point. Personally, I lean towards Captivate as it’s nice to be able to drop more episodes when we want to without being restricted due to the plan.
User Experience and Interface
Navigating the back ends of both platforms also reveals unique strengths. Captivate’s interface is rich with features like episodes, content library, playlists, and ad insertion points. It's jam-packed but intuitive if you're keen on customisation and comprehensive control over your podcast.
On the flip side, Buzzsprout boasts a clean and simple interface, perfect for beginners who want to get up and running without a steep learning curve. It’s straightforward but less feature-rich compared to Captivate.
Monetisation and Membership Options
Here’s where it gets interesting—both platforms offer ways to monetise your podcast through memberships and tips. Buzzsprout takes a 15% cut on all subscriptions, while Captivate doesn’t take any cut at all. For podcasters planning to monetise, Captivate's setup seems more appealing as it lets you keep more of your hard-earned money from your subscribers.
Dynamic Content and Ad Insertion
Both platforms enable dynamic content, but Captivate allows for more precise control, letting you decide where exactly your mid-roll ads go. Buzzsprout automates this process with AI technology to assess where best to place your ad, which might be convenient for some but limiting for others who like having control over ad placement. I personally like to be able to choose where to put the break point.
Neither platform lets you select any dates for the ads to run to and from, which is a feature that I find extremely valuable. For our podcasters who run more targeted campaigns with structured dates, we use Omnystudio as they are best in class in this area.
Analytics: Unveiling Your Podcast Performance
Analytics are crucial to understand your audience, and both platforms offer robust stats. Buzzsprout provides a clean and colourful interface, making it easy to digest your data at a glance. Captivate, however, provides unique listener numbers that give a slightly deeper insight into your audience. I do find Captivate’s stats area a little harder to navigate and there are some extra metrics there (like comparing one episode to another) that I feel could be done away with.
Website Integration and Customisation
When it comes to website integration, both platforms offer straightforward solutions, but Captivate really shines with its ability to seamlessly integrate an embed player with your existing website. The design customisation options are more advanced, making it look like your podcast player was always part of your website.
So, who wins this battle? It honestly depends on what you're looking for.
If you're a newbie aiming for a simple and clean interface to get started quickly, Buzzsprout might be your best bet. Its straightforward features and lower price point make it a fantastic starting point.
However, if you're a seasoned podcaster craving more control, deeper analytics, and better monetisation options, Captivate is the clear winner. The latter’s feature-rich environment can grow with you as your podcast evolves.
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Transcript:
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[00:00:00] Here at Bamby Media, we've been producing podcasts for clients for probably almost a decade. And I'd say at this point we've worked with almost every single podcast host that there is. So we've got the likes of Omni Studio, Simplecast, Podbean, Libsyn, Blueberry, Acast. There's just no shortage of them.
[00:00:28] There are so many different hosts to choose from. And I know that that's something that can really be confusing for people. Cause they're like, well, what's the difference? don't they all largely do the same thing? And the short answer is yes, they do all largely have the same basic functions. But I do feel that not all podcast hosting platforms are created equally. And after so many years working with podcasters and looking at what they actually need, there are two clear standouts for me that I'm going to chat through with you today here on the podcast. My two favorites currently at time of recording are Buzzsprout and Captivate. Buzzsprout is a U. S. based company and Captivate is a U. K. based company.
[00:01:12] They both charge in U. S. dollars and I'm going to give you a bit of a breakdown as to why I've chosen these two and give them kind of a bit of a battle here because there are definitely differences even between my two favorites. So let's start with first the price point.
[00:01:28] So at this time of recording Captivate starts at about US 19 per month. You get 30, 000 downloads per month. At that price point, uh, with unlimited shows and storage, meaning you can have multiple podcasts on that same platform on that same plan without you accruing extra, account fees, right? So that's really good if you're thinking about maybe starting a network of your own where you have multiple shows that you look after And you're not imagining that you'll go past that 30, 000 [00:02:00] download a month realm.
[00:02:01] So it's really good for a newer podcaster. That's probably not going to be hitting those numbers. Buzzsprout has a base plan that slightly cheaper at us 12 per month. that gives you three hours of uploads monthly, but. It doesn't cap you at the amount of downloads that you actually get. This is something from Buzzsprout that I really like.
[00:02:19] So if you're getting really good numbers, your downloads are really quite high. It's not penalizing you for having a popular show. It's just saying, Hey, that's awesome. But you can only do up to three hours per month. So that can be limiting if you have a show that Often runs longer than an hour or even just shy of an hour and you're releasing weekly, you're not gonna be able to get that amount of, hours in that plan.
[00:02:46] The US $12 plan, the next one up, I believe is around us, 18 or something a month, which gives you six hours a month and then that would cover you just fine. So from a price point perspective, I do believe that Buzzsprout is slightly cheaper because even if you went up to the US 18 per month for the second pricing tier of Buzzsprout, you're not penalized ever for the amount of downloads.
[00:03:10] So that is a good thing to be made aware of.
[00:03:13] If we then now look at the basic user experience and the interfaces for both of these platforms, they both have a really nice back end where you actually upload your podcast, where you look at your statistics, all that sort of stuff. There's been a great deal of care on both of the platform sides here.
[00:03:31] Buzzsprout I find to be a lot different. Cleaner like a lot simpler to look at it's got some nice really bright green that is easy to navigate around and it sort of makes other things pop and that's really good if you are a little bit overwhelmed by tech or having too many functions. Then Buzzsprout is going to be a platform that makes a lot of sense to you.
[00:03:52] It's so easy to upload an episode. you could know absolutely nothing and you'd be totally fine using Buzzsprout from a user [00:04:00] interface perspective. So this is the platform that we definitely recommend for newbie podcasters that don't want to be overwhelmed with all this like hosting backend stuff.
[00:04:09] It's very simple. Captivate on the other hand is a lot more detailed in its user experience on the backend, which I personally really like because it gives you a lot more features. There's a lot more things that you can do in Captivate that you can't do in Buzzsprout, even just like.
[00:04:27] Doing your research and putting in your show notes and booking in your guests You can send them booking links through the actual back end of captivate. You can link it up to the place that you're going to actually have your Episodes recorded on whether that's Riverside or whatever you can embed the links into your captivate sort of back end Like it's just quite seamless from that side of things, it's a nice experience there, putting in your research links, putting in your affiliates, any sort of codes, any attribution links that you want to include, and actually tracking how they're going, how many people are clicking on those links, like that sort of stuff from Captivate.
[00:05:04] It absolutely blows Buzzsprout out of the water. Like it's nowhere near the amount of advanced kind of depth that you can go into from a user experience and interface back end, part of these platforms. But I do absolutely recognize and understand that not all people need all the things that Captivate has there.
[00:05:27] So That's a tricky one for me to weigh in on personally. I think Captivate wins in this section because I like that it does all those things, but if you're a newbie podcaster, Buzzsprout would be totally fine and much easier and simpler for you to understand.
[00:05:41] Now, if we look at monetization and membership options, here's where it gets a little bit interesting because both platforms offer ways to monetize your podcast through memberships and tips. But Buzzsprout takes a cut. It takes a 15 percent cut of all subscriptions while Captivate Doesn't take any cut at all. [00:06:00] That is a pretty big defining feature, especially as more and more people, uh, want to monetize their shows. They want to get like a bit of crowdfunding, crowdsourcing going. you know, that's a pretty big deal to have a 15 percent cut, go to Buzzsprout and no cut to Captivate.
[00:06:15] That's a no brainer for me. If you're wanting to monetize and you want to do it through the actual platform. So Buzzsprout or Captivate. Which you can do, you can set up everything through the back end of both of those platforms. Captivate would have to win because they're not taking any of your cash.
[00:06:32] Now we're rolling into dynamic content and actual ad insertion. So both platforms enable dynamic content. So Captivate though, allows For more precise control, because they let you actually decide where exactly your mid roll ads are going to go into each episode. So what this essentially means is, is that when you upload an episode or when you're editing an episode, like our audio editors do here, as you're going along, you're deciding, Oh, that's a really good breakdown.
[00:07:00] Like they've said something there that really wraps up that section and they're going to move into something else now. So now I'm going to put the ad role that I've been planning in this bit, in this break point. So really good place to put it. We've decided that. And then in the backend of Captivate, you can actually select, put the ad role here, right?
[00:07:20] Whereas Buzzsprout doesn't give you that option at time of recording. It just says. Yep, put your midroll in and then from with its AI stuff, they assess the waveform and then the AI decides where the best place is for that actual ad.
[00:07:36] I don't love that. Personally, I really want to be in control as a podcast producer, uh, where those ads are placed and where I feel like the best junction point is going to be. So Captivate absolutely wins for me in this section. the thing that I will say though, is that neither platform actually lets you select any dates for the ads to run to and [00:08:00] from.
[00:08:00] that's a silly feature, I think, not to have, because if you're running a more detailed campaign, if you're working with a sponsor and they want that, that sponsor campaign to run from X date to the X date for this time and that time, you can't actually specify any of those things in Captivate or Buzzsprout.
[00:08:17] There are no dates associated. You have to physically go in and turn them off. And I think that's quite silly. the absolute standout for me that does this really well from an ad insertion is actually Omni studio. And for our podcasters that have campaigns that run, that have, higher level sponsors, or they want more targeted, I guess control over that, then Omni Studio is where we host those shows because of that, but you do pay through the teeth for Omni Studio, especially if you want to run ads through their tap platform. And so it's not something that everyone can afford or would want for just the, the sort of one off campaigns, or if you're running campaigns for your own, courses, platforms, your own services, that feels like that might be a bit.
[00:09:04] debilitating from a price point point of view. So then from that aspect, I guess that's why Captivate and Buzzsprout win there. But OmniStudio is absolutely a front runner for me personally, for anything that needs more campaign control.
[00:09:18] If we dive now into just the actual analytics and how these things operate on Buzzsprout and Captivate, it's a very similar situation here. In fact, every podcast host that we've ever worked with is pretty similar in the way that it delivers statistics. everyone gives you where people are listening, like as in the actual countries, the geography, what cities they're in all the way down to that kind of more targeted information.
[00:09:43] It gives you the platform that they're using, whether that's Apple Podcasts, or Castbox, or Overcast, or you know, there's so many of those that people prefer to listen to their podcasts on. and it even gives you data around, you know, whether they're using it on a desktop, or they're using it on a [00:10:00] phone, like all that sort of data is really across the board, it's all there for you, no matter what platform that you use. One of the things that I think is better at this time for Captivate is that it does give you the unique listeners. So instead of just giving you an overall, like, this is how many downloads you're getting, it's actually giving you a little bit more targeted information about the actual amount of unique listeners that you're getting.
[00:10:22] That's some good data. You can also get that kind of data from the backend of Spotify for podcasters. So if you sign up for Spotify for podcasters, even if your show is not hosted on Spotify, you can get a more strategic kind of data around your show just for people that listen to it or watch it on Spotify.
[00:10:39] Buzzsprout I find a bit simpler to look at from a statistical point of view. You can see things laid out a little bit easier. Captivate is just a little bit. the experience of it isn't as nice, like just to understand what your data is telling you. I find just a little bit more convoluted.
[00:10:55] And it also has this area where you can kind of compete, like you could compare one episode to another. you know, I don't really need that information as much. I guess if you had two guests on that was similar and then you could see how those two guests were, or if you were putting similar content together, then maybe you would do that compare feature.
[00:11:12] But there are some features that I think in the statistics point of view, probably don't need to be there from captivate. And that's why it feels a little bit clunkier from that perspective. So Buzzsprout probably wins in the statistics point of view there. It used to not because you couldn't actually even customize the dates when you wanted to search how your show was going on, like through specific dates.
[00:11:35] It just wouldn't let you do that, which I thought was really dumb, but now it does do that. So Buzzsprout has made some improvements in the statistics.
[00:11:43] And if we look at website integrations and like customization, when it comes to that kind of thing, like the actual embed players that you get from both of those platforms, it's a similar experience. Although, uh, the captivate embed looks much nicer in my opinion. If you went to the [00:12:00] bambumedia. com slash podcast page, and then you clicked on one of our podcasts sort of episodes there, you'd see that there's an embed.
[00:12:09] Player in there so you can just hit play and then it will start playing the actual episode. That looks nicer. It looks nice. It looks like it's just always been on the website. It doesn't look like it's something that's brought to you by Captivate. It's simple. It's clean. You can make it look a little bit more like you want it to look.
[00:12:27] I just like more of the customization features in Captivate there from the embed player perspective. But Buzzsprouts is totally fine as well. The other thing I'll say on this is that Both Buzzsprout and Captivate also have a feature where you don't necessarily have to have a website of your own, like BambiMedia.
[00:12:45] com. You can just direct people to your own website, like your web page for your podcast. that's, that's kind of fun, but the Buzzsprout one kind of sucks. Like, I don't like that at all. It just looks bad, really. I would not direct people to that. Whereas the Captivate one, if you just click on a few things, customize it a little bit, that looks really quite good.
[00:13:08] You could just give that to someone. If you didn't have a podcast, actual website, you could direct them to your Captivate version for your podcast. And it just displays really nicely, all the information. It's kind of like a little blog. And I really like the way that looks. So if we think about all this, who actually wins this battle?
[00:13:30] I mean, it honestly does depend on what you're looking for. I think if you're a newbie that's aiming for a simple and clean interface to get started quickly, Buzzsprout's going to be your best bet. It's really straightforward. The features are easy to understand. It doesn't have too many features. It's a lower price point and it doesn't penalize you for having too many downloads.
[00:13:51] So. That's great. buzzsprout is really good for the newbie that doesn't need it to be kind of feature rich for me personally, for the [00:14:00] podcasters that we have on our client roster that we know we're going to need a little bit more, we always put them on captivate because they are more seasoned, or we can see that they're really going to be needing some extra things.
[00:14:13] They want maybe more control, or we want more control. Uh, we want to be able to dial in their dynamic ads more. We want deeper analytics. We want better monetization options for them. We want to track their attribution links better, all that sort of stuff. These are the clients that are on quite large packages with us, and we can see the benefit of Captivate for them.
[00:14:35] And that is a clear winner for us. So. Yeah, that's my kind of roundup of the two. Both are really, really good platforms. Either way that you go here, you're going to get a very good outcome. Buzzsprout has really good customer service as well. Captivate does too. They both have great resources online. They both have really good founders as well.
[00:14:58] So it's, it's going to be a good experience either way you go. But for me today, for what we need for our clients, Captivate is the winner. Because of the extra things that you get within the platform, that Buzzsprout doesn't quite have a handle on. Let me know if you agree, uh, who you're hosted with. Would you consider migrating?
[00:15:21] That would be something that would be interesting to think about. We do have affiliate links to Buzzsprout and Captivate, and we also do have a migration service that will migrate you from your host that perhaps you're not happy with to a host that you really like. Well, after reviewing this, maybe you want to go with one of these ones instead.
[00:15:40] So you can reach out to us if you'd like us to migrate you to one of these other platforms. The other thing I will say as well about Captivate, which is really cool, is that they actually have a legacy feature for your statistics. So if you were, because a lot of people are concerned about migrating and they're going to lose all their statistics from their other hosts, which is [00:16:00] completely valid and absolutely fine.
[00:16:01] Absolutely, is the case like you have to export all your data from your other host. The cool thing about Captivate is yeah, they have this legacy feature for statistics now, which means that you can now download all the data from your other host.
[00:16:14] Upload that data to Captivate and it will put all that legacy data in so that you can have more of an actual running total of how your show is going. That's a fairly new feature for Captivate. When I say new, maybe it's about four or five months or so. I can't remember, I think that's a pretty big game changer for me.
[00:16:33] if you're interested in either of those platforms, click on the links. If you want us to migrate you, go for it. Other than that, I hope this really helps you make a decision or just be sure of this decision that you already made.
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