When comparing Pocket Casts vs Overcast, the Slant community recommends Pocket Casts for most people. In the question“What are the best online podcast players?” Pocket Casts is ranked 2nd while Overcast is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose Pocket Casts is:
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.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Remembers playback speed & starting position
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.
Pro Quick access to Sleep Timer
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.
Pro Vibrant aesthetics
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.
Pro Auto download specific podcasts
You can set Pocket Casts to automatically download the latest episode of a podcast, whenever a new episode is released.
Pro Excellent, easy to use discovery system
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 The team behind Pocket Casts work hard to maintain a reliable and high quality catalog so you can avoid out of date listings, problems with raw feeds, etc.
Pro Sync with iPhone, iPad, Android
If you use Pocket Casts on more than one device, you can synchronize settings, playback positions, etc., across all your devices.
Pro Sonos integration
It is possible to connect Pocket Casts with Sonos, and play podcasts.
Pro Global and per-podcast playback settings
Enables you to set a "global" playback speed to use for all podcasts which can be over-ridden by a podcast specific playback speed.
Pro Automated playlist creation
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.
Pro Can set custom skip-forward and back timing
You can set custom "skip forward" and "skip backward" timings for easily skipping past parts of podcasts you don't like.
Pro Smart Speed and Voice Boost
For listening to talk shows, Smart Speed allows you to skip silences and pauses. Voice Boost is very helpful when the speakers vary from really quiet to really loud - it balances the whole thing out. And you enable them during playback, so neither will mess up music podcasts.
Pro Voice Boost
Boosts and normalizes volume.
Pro Very good audio quality
It has the best sounding audio when sped up. It also has neat features like the "Voice Boost" setting being tuned for being played when the phone is set flat on a table.
Pro Feed redirection
Sometimes podcasts change their hosts/urls. Overcast will handle and remember this.
Pro Easy playlists
Simple UI for making playlists of podcasts.
Pro Podcast specific settings
Speed, voice boost, smart speed, notifications, download/stream new episodes.
Pro Chapters navigation
Supports several Features for a great #UX to navigate Podcasts Episodes with chapter marks. Even shows a visual timeline for each chapter.
Pro Timestamp sharing
Links to episodes can be combined with timestamps for easy sharing (links the timestamp to the web app).
Pro Good catalogue
Pretty much the same as the other options, but nicer categories and list views.
Pro Ability to add podcast from URL
RSS or whatever else will work.
Pro Themes
Light, Dark (dark blue), Black.
Pro OPML import/export support
Pro Twitter integration
Recommendations within the app are surfaced to your followers.
Cons
Con Cannot create custom playlists
You can not add specific podcast episodes to create a custom playlist. While you can set up "filters" to create a playlist, if you're trying to follow a thread of specific podcast episodes, you can't set that up.
Con Skip episode often does not work with CarPlay
The Skip Episode feature, to automatically mark an episode as listened to and finshed, often does not work in CarPlay mode. Instead, you have to push the "skip forward" button a lot. Good luck having a long enough stoplight for that!
Con Does not work with paid podcasts
Con The ability to discover new or relevant podcasts ("Recommended for you") is practically useless
Similarly, the search feature seems to only look for podcast hosts or podcast names. You can't find all podcasts that has a specific guest.
Con Very barebones webapp
Con Unplayed episodes
Does not have the ability to show unplayed episodes for individual podcasts.
Con Adds a subscription even after listening a single episode
It is not possible to pick a single Podcast Episode to download without having to subscribe to yet another Podcast feed (that shows up in your Subscriptions List).
Con Can't set a subscription to NOT download any episodes
By subscribing to a podcast you have to set it to download at least one (most recent) episode. There is the setting to set the podcast to stream only, but would prefer to set to zero downloads and choose which episodes to download individually.
Con Unable to sort by playtime
It would be nice to have the ability to sort tracks like podcasts from the shortest to the longest.
Con No paged RSS feeds
this Podcatcher does not support reading longer RSS Feeds that are split into several pages (for faster access).