Overview
Podcastle (now Async) is a strong recording-first studio. You hop into a remote Room with a guest, capture each speaker on a separate track, then clean up the audio with noise reduction and AI tools, transcribe it, and turn the result into clips. It has its own library of AI voices, text-to-speech, AI dubbing, and a Revoice feature that clones your voice. For people who want to record conversations and polish them, it is a capable all-in-one production tool. In early 2026 Podcastle rebranded to Async (async.com) and repositioned around video, describing itself as a chat-based AI creative suite for video content production, so audio podcasting is no longer its main focus. podcastle.ai now redirects to async.com.
Podcastle assumes you are going to record. Jellypod, a Podcastle alternative, works the other way around. You bring source material (documents, articles, a topic, 70+ file types) and the platform generates a finished episode: an AI script you can edit, AI hosts with their own personalities, voice cloning, audio in 70+ languages, a timeline editor for music and SFX, and then it hosts the show on an RSS feed, publishes a per-creator podcast website, and pushes one-click distribution to Spotify, Apple, and YouTube with audience analytics on the back end.
If you are weighing recording studios specifically, our Jellypod vs Riverside comparison goes deeper on that angle.
Podcastle rebranded to Async in early 2026 and now leads with AI video, with podcasting a smaller part of the suite.
Our Verdict: The Best Podcastle Alternative
Podcastle and Jellypod both call themselves podcast platforms, but they start at opposite ends of the workflow. Async is the better choice if your podcast begins with a microphone. The remote recording, multitrack capture, transcription, and audio cleanup are genuinely good, and at $11.99/mo for the Essentials plan it is an affordable way to record and edit a conversation-driven show.
Jellypod is the better choice if your podcast begins with a document or a topic and you do not want to record at all. It generates the episode from your source material, gives you persistent AI hosts, and then handles the publishing half Async leaves to other tools: it hosts, distributes, and measures the show. That end-to-end pipeline is why educators, healthcare and CME teams, L&D departments, faith leaders, and non-profits pick it. They have expert content already and need it turned into a finished, distributed podcast without a studio.
For many creators the real question is simple: do you want to record and polish a conversation, or turn what you already wrote into a podcast people will finish? Podcastle is built for the first job, Jellypod for the second.