In case you haven’t heard, SoundCloud recently announced that it’s opened up its podcasting features to all users. Previously, you had to request an invite in order to use SoundCloud as the hosting provider for your podcast.
What does this mean? With 175 million+ monthly listeners and 15,000+ podcasters are now using SoundCloud! This platform has arisen as a serious contender to the well-known and popular podcasting hosting service, Libsyn.
But, what are the differences between Soundcloud and Libsyn? Which should you use? I’ll answer a few of those questions below from my own research and experience.
SoundCloud
SoundCloud has been around since 2007, but up until this time, the company has primarily focused on the mainstream audio listening audience. Recently, that auidence has grown to include the podcasting segment
The Podcast Player
Like Libsyn, SoundCloud offers an embeddable player, however, unlike Libsyn, this player allows users to comment on specific portions of the song. In addition, the player has social share options, so that listeners can easily share episodes to their social network, and the option to “like” or “download” a track. You can also follow a user on their SoundCloud page or go to their page to leave a comment on a track.
The SoundCloud player also allows users to easily embed specific tracks from a user’s profile online, re-post it, add it to a playlist, or see how many plays a particular track has.
The Stats and Analytics
SoundCloud’s stats and analytics include the ability to see where your fans have listened to your podcast (player, mobile app, etc), the number of file downloads, the number of RSS downloads, and the top countries for those downloads. Finally, Pro users can hide the information displayed on most public players like comments, plays, reposts, and likes.
Pricing
- Free Plan (3 hours of upload time)
- Pro Plan (6 hours of upload time): $6/month.
- Pro Unlimited (unlimited hours): $15/month.
You can find the pricing list here.
Libsyn
The podcast hosting website Libysn was started in 2004 and has been one of the top hosting choices up until this point for podcasters. The website hosts over 10,000 podcasts and has 18 million+ audience members in their network.
The Podcast Player
The Libsyn Podcast Player comes with three templates and primarily allows listeners to play the podcast, pause it, or change the volume, as I’ve shown below.
It also allows podcasters to set the player to “play upon loading,” customize the width/height, and whether or not a thumbnail should be included. Podcasters can also grab a download url or link to a page that contains their playable podcast episode or the “blog” that Libsyn creates for each podcast, which I’ve shown below.
The Stats and Analytics
Since, I’m only on the $15/month plan I only have access to basic statistics, like the total number of downloads and the downloads per episode, but the $20/month plan will give advanced stats regarding geographic data, and the types of technology used (Chrome/Firefox/iTunes) to download the podcast.
You can see some screenshots of their advanced statistics here.
Pricing
- Classic Plan – 50 mb: $5
- Classic Plan – 250mb: $15
- Advanced (400 mb to 1,500 mb): $40-$75
For me, a 30 minute podcast is about 45 mb, though I’m still learning how to best format audio. You can find the pricing here.
Conclusion
After doing this comparison, it almost seems like a no-brainer that Libsyn is going to need to make some major changes to keep up with SoundCloud’s functionality, community, and pricing. The Libsyn player/UI is outdated. Also, for $15 a month I could get unlimited storage on SoundCloud.
The one leg up that I think Libsyn has over SoundCloud is that Libsyn has been around longer and has established a reputation of being a dependable provider. However, SoundCloud has been hosting audio files for a long time, just not podcasting files.
Although I currently host my podcast with Libsyn, I’m now thinking about switching to SoundCloud. Where do you host your podcast? What do you think of the debate between SoundCloud vs. Libsyn?
