When comparing Castro vs Player FM, the Slant community recommends Player FM for most people. In the question“What are the best online podcast players?” Player FM is ranked 1st while Castro is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose Player FM is:
Functional web app that shares settings with Android app.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Chapter Support (Premium Feature)
If a Podcast Show has chapters, then you can pre-select the ones that you want to listen to and it skips all other chapters on auto pilot.
Pro Beautiful, easy to use interface
Castro has an intuitive, minimalistic interface.
Pro Auto downloads podcasts
Pro Adjust playback speed
There are seven different playback speeds ranging from 0.5x (slow) to 2x (fast). It also uses a voice-optimized playback algorithm so the sound quality is great no matter which speed you prefer.
Pro Sleep timer
Pro Web player
Functional web app that shares settings with Android app.
Pro Seamless offline support
Latest episodes from Subscriptions and Play Later are automatically kept offline.
Pro Discovery
Can follow whole topics and search individual episodes.
Pro Cloud sync
Subscriptions and favorite topics sync across devices and the web.
Pro Best online support
Pro No ads
This shows a responsible attitude about in-app ads.
Cons
Con very expensive Premium Features
If you want any of those Premium Features then you need to pay for a Subscription that costs $ 3.- each month or 20.- every year.
Con auto deletes Downloads
downloaded media is removed immediately after the episode has ended.
Therefore you are not able to read show notes of said episode or lookup links in chapters.
And if your are offline and need to listen again to any part (for whatever reason) of that show, then you are out of luck. The whole show has to be downloaded again.
Con Lacks categorization and charts
Con Next played episode is wrong sometimes
On some podcasts when an episode ends the player "jumps" to the last episode or even to an entirely different podcast.