Pocket Casts vs Instapaper

You can set a 'start from' position for a podcast to skip a set number of seconds from the beginning of an episode. Great for when you don't want to listen to an intro you've heard a couple of dozen times before.

Additionally, you can also change the playback speed, to slow down fast talkers or speed up slow talkers.

The most pleasing User Experience (UX) to set a Sleep Timer.
Activating the sleep timer will stop the podcast after a set period of time or at the End of the Episode.

Pocket Casts has one of the most colorful, pleasant to use interfaces.

For example, the app takes the most prominent color from the album art and colorizes the rest of the playback interface based on that color. This allows the app to stay vibrant and slightly different for each podcast.

Or the way it displays featured podcasts in a colorful mosaic made from album art, makes the whole experience of using the app pleasant.

You can set Pocket Casts to automatically download the latest episode of a podcast, whenever a new episode is released.

Clicking the plus button in the top-right corner will bring you to featured podcasts. From there you can access multiple ways of finding new things to listen to such as: top charts (that can be separated in audio and video), search (that allows searching both by name and feed URL), a list of podcast networks and different podcast categories.

They also have a great selection of podcasts to choose from. The team behind Pocket Casts work hard to maintain a reliable and high quality catalog so you can avoid out of date listings, problems with raw feeds, etc.

If you use Pocket Casts on more than one device, you can synchronize settings, playback positions, etc., across all your devices.

It is possible to connect Pocket Casts with Sonos, and play podcasts.

Enables you to set a "global" playback speed to use for all podcasts which can be over-ridden by a podcast specific playback speed.

Pocket Casts has a feature called Episode Filter, that allows automatically creating playlists based on setting such as playing states (unplayed, playing, played), status (downloaded, downloading, not downloaded), episode type (audio, video) and of course podcasts themselves.

You can also customize the appearance of the playlist with a color and an icon to help it stand out easier.

You can set custom "skip forward" and "skip backward" timings for easily skipping past parts of podcasts you don't like.

Allows leaving notes attached to articles and highlighting certain part of the text. Free version of the app is limited to 5 highlights a month.

Instapaper allows you to choose from 14 different fonts, some of which have been designed specifically for the application. You can manually adjust spacing between lines, padding around text and font size to fit your preferences.

Instapaper comes with a build in text-to-speech feature that will read out loud articles. Premium version of the app allows creating playlists.

You can add articles to Instapaper by sending them to a unique email address associated with your account.

Allows for pagination, not just scrolling.

Instapaper includes a dark theme and allows switching to it after a set period in time or gradually over the course of the day.

In addition to allowing you to sort articles by when you saved them, you can also order articles by length or read progress and popularity.

In Pocket, this is a paid function - but Instapaper provides this for free! If a webpage is deleted, it remains in your Instapaper and they even archive pictures of the articles.

Instapaper will play videos from YouTube, Vimeo and other sources that are embedded in articles, but you have to be online for playback to work.

Instapaper includes Dyslexie a font that helps people with reading problems understand the text better.

If you set your Instapaper profile to be public, your friends will be able to see articles you've liked.