About Castopod
Castopod is a free and open-source podcast hosting solution for podcasters who want to engage and interact with their audience. It lets you publish and manage a podcast on your own server instead of a third-party hosting service. The project's topics point to analytics, self-hosting and the Podcasting 2.0 initiative, and it is built on the CodeIgniter 4 PHP framework.
Castopod comes pre-packaged with all the static assets and dependencies it needs, so you download it and follow the getting-started page to install it. Translations are managed through Crowdin, and the repository has contribution guidelines. The GitHub repository is a synchronized read-only mirror, and the maintainers state that contributions made on any repository other than the original at code.castopod.org will not be accepted.
Security issues should be reported by email to the address in the README. The software is licensed under AGPL-3.0, which applies if you run a modified version as a public service.
Key features
- Podcast hosting on your own server
- Audience engagement features
- Podcasting 2.0 support
- Built-in analytics
- Pre-packaged install with dependencies
- Community translations via Crowdin
Good fit for
- →Self-hosting a podcast and its RSS feed
- →Replacing a third-party podcast host
- Built with
- PHP
- Tags
- podcast
- podcasting
- hosting
- self-hosted
- php
- codeigniter
- analytics
- audio
Castopod: questions and answers
- What is Castopod used for?
- Castopod is a free, self-hosted podcast hosting platform for podcasters who want to publish episodes and engage with their audience, built with PHP. It is a good fit for self-hosting a podcast and its RSS feed, and replacing a third-party podcast host.
- Is Castopod open source?
- Yes. Castopod is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at ad-aures/castopod and is written mainly in PHP.
- Is Castopod free?
- Yes. Castopod is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
- Can I self-host Castopod?
- Yes. Castopod can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
- What is Castopod an alternative to?
- Castopod is an open-source alternative to Buzzsprout, Libsyn, Transistor and Podbean. Other open-source alternatives to Buzzsprout include Microfeed.
- Is Castopod actively maintained?
- The most recent commit to Castopod was on 5 June 2026. The project has 874 stars on GitHub.
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