Pocket Casts vs Google Play Music

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 The team behind Pocket Casts work hard to maintain a reliable and high quality catalog so you can avoid out of date listings, problems with raw feeds, etc.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.

Google Play Music is a free service for storing and streaming ones library that has zero advertisements in the interface as well as the playing music.

Google Play Music can make smart recommendations for playlist by the user just picking an artist or song they want recommendations formed from.

GPM can be used as a normal music player but also as a streaming service like Spotify.

Plays local music as well as from DLNA sources, so I can play from my home servers as well.

Google has added the option of uploading songs through the browser with the help of a Chrome extension download as well as directly through the desktop Chrome app.