Welcome 👋

Castopod is a free & open-source hosting platform made for podcasters who want engage and interact with their audience.

Castopod is easy to install and was built on top of CodeIgniter4, a powerful PHP framework with a very small footprint.

Features

🌱 Free & open-source (AGPL v3 License)
🔐 Focused on data sovereignty: your content, audience, and analytics belong to you, and you only
🪄 Podcasting 2.0 features: GUID, locked, transcripts, funding, chapters, location, persons, soundbites, …
💬 Built-in social network:
- 🚀 Castopod is part of the Fediverse, a decentralized social network
- ❤️ Create posts, share, favourite, and comment on episodes
📈 Built-in analytics:
- ⚖️ GDPR / CCPA / LGPD compliant
- 🪙 Standard IABv2 audience measurement
- 🏡 On-premises analytics, no third party involved
📢 Built-in marketing tools:
- ✅ SEO ready (open-graph meta-tags, JSON-LD, …)
- 📱 PWA: install as a standalone app
- 🎨 Customizable theme colors
- 🎬 Generate ready-to-share Video clips from episodes
- 🔉 Generate soundbites
- ▶️ Embeddable player, embed your episodes on any website
💸 Monetization:
- 🔗 Funding links
- 📲 listen-to-click ads
- 🤝 value4value / WebMonetization
- 💎 Premium podcasts
📡 Publish your episodes everywhere with RSS:
- 📱 On all indexes and apps: Podcast Index, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Deezer, Podcast Addict, Podfriend, …
- ⚡ Broadcast your episodes instantly with WebSub
📥 Podcast import: move your existing podcast into Castopod
📤 Move your podcast out of Castopod
🔀 Multi-tenant: host as many podcasts as you want
👥 Multi-user: add contributors and set roles
🌎 i18n support: translated in English, French, Polish, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, simplified Chinese… and many more!

Motivation

The podcasting ecosystem is decentralized by nature: you can create your podcast as an RSS file, publish it on the web and have it shared everywhere online.

It is in fact one of the only media to have stayed this way for a long time.

As usages are evolving, more and more people are getting into podcasts: whether it is creators finding new ways to share their ideas, or listeners in the search for better content.

With podcasting becoming more widely used, some companies are trying to shift it towards a more controlled and centralized medium.

Castopod was created in an effort to provide an open and sustainable alternative to hosting your podcasts, promoting decentralization to ensure that podcasters creativity can express itself.

This project is pushed by the open-source community, and specifically by the Fediverse and Podcasting 2.0 movements.

Comparison with other solutions

We believe that a solution is not necessarily right for everyone, it highly depends on your needs. So, here are comparisons with other tools to help you to gauge whether Castopod is the right fit for you.

Castopod vs Wordpress

Castopod is often referred to as “the Wordpress for podcasts” because of the similarities between the two. In some ways this is true. And actually, Castopod was greatly inspired by the Wordpress ecosystem, seeing the ease of adoption from the community and the number of websites running it.

Just like Wordpress, Castopod is free & open source, built using PHP with a MySQL database and is packaged in a way that you can easily install on most web servers.

Wordpress is a great way to create your website and extend it with plugins to get what you want. It is a full fledged CMS that helps you get any type of website online.

On the other hand, Castopod is meant to address the podcasters needs specifically, focusing on podcasting, and nothing else. You don’t need any plugin to get you started on your podcasting journey.

This allows optimizing the processes specific to podcasting: ranging from the creation of your podcasts and the publication of new episodes all the way to broadcasting, marketing and analytics.

Finally, depending on your needs, Wordpress and Castopod can even live side by side as they share the same requirements!

Castopod vs Funkwhale

Funkwhale is a self-hosted, modern free and open-source music server. Just as Castopod, Funkwhale is on the fediverse, a decentralized social network allowing interoperability between the two.

Funkwhale was initially built around music. And later on, as the project evolved, the ability to host podcasts was introduced.

Unlike Funkwhale, Castopod has been designed and built around podcasting exclusively. This allows easier implementation for features related to the podcasting ecosystem, such as the podcasting 2.0 features (transcripts, chapters, locations, persons, …).

So, you should probably use Funkwhale if you want to host your music, and use Castopod if you want to host your podcasts.

Castopod vs other podcast hosts

There are many solutions for you to host your podcasts, some of which are really great and a lot of them are jumping into the Podcasting 2.0 wagon just like Castopod!

Each of these solutions differ from one another, you may compare with the list of features.

That being said, there are two main differences with other podcasting solutions:

Castopod can be self-hosted and is the only solution that allows you to keep full control over what you produce. Also, as it is open-source, you can even customize it as you wish.
Castopod is the only solution that currently integrates both a decentralized social network with ActivityPub as well as many of the podcasting 2.0 features, hoping to bridge the gap between the two.

Contributing

Love Castopod and would like to help? Take a look at the following documentation to get you started.

Code of conduct

Castopod has adopted a Code of Conduct that we expect project participants to adhere to. Please read the CODE_OF_CONDUCT manual so that you can understand what actions will and will not be tolerated.

Contributing guide

Read our contributing guide to learn about our development process, how to propose bugfixes and improvements, and how to build and test your changes to Castopod.