PowerPress vs Seriously Simple Podcasting – WordPress Plugins Compared

In this video I will look at the differences between the PowerPress plugin by Blubrry and the Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin by Castos. Both of these plugins are available for free and can be used to add some podcasting features to any WordPress website.

Video Transcription

Plugin Statistics

PowerPress was first released in 2008 and currently has over 50,000 active installations.
Seriously Simple Podcasting was first released in 2012 and has over 30,000 active installations.

Both plugins are updated a few times a month, even if only with minor changes.

Both plugins have a little over 200 reviews, but PowerPress has more neutral and negative reviews than SSP.

In the last 12 months, both plugins have received many new support threads in the WordPress.org community forums, where plugin developers are actively helping users.

PowerPress (by Blubrry) – Plugin Overview

Now let’s look at what these plugins look like, both on the front-end and in the back-end.

PowerPress has multiple Settings pages with a design that feels outdated and unfinished.

Here’s an example of what I mean: on the main Settings page, the “Save Changes” button is unstyled and easy to miss.
The upsell buttons on the left look more like form submission buttons than the Save Changes button.

But if you go to the Audio Player and Video Player pages, the Save Changes button now looks somewhat normal. But it has no styling for the :hover and :active states.

Other pages look unstyled and unfinished too. Of course that’s not extremely important, but I’m sure many users will struggle to figure out the importance of elements on these pages.

The episode creation process looks simple enough, though I dislike the fact that there is no Upload File button in the custom meta box. Instead there is a Blubrry promo block 🙂

Seriously Simple Podcasting (by Castos) – Plugin Overview

The Settings pages of Seriously Simple Podcasting use the standard WordPress admin design and style. This makes the process a little more comfortable and intuitive.

There are less settings to go through than in PowerPress, but they are also organized a lot better.

Creating a Podcast episode is easier simply because there is a basic Upload File button, something that’s missing in PowerPress.

On the front-end, the default media players in SSP look better too.

Podcast Hosting Price Plans

Both companies behind these plugins provide podcasting hosting at an extra cost.

At a quick glance, the plans offered by Blubrry are all the same, with the exception of the monthly storage limit.
Looking at my own audio files, a 30-minute mp3 file is around 50 megabytes.

So depending on your audio quality, the 100MB monthly storage limit for the Small plan means that you might be able to upload only one one-hour episode every month. That is of course if I understood these plans correctly.

The plans offered by Castos come with unlimited uploads, downloads and bandwidth. It’s tough to beat unlimited plans. If you want to host video content, you will have to go for the Pro plan.

Final verdict

I tend to favor Seriously Simple Podcasting for a few main reasons: it’s easier to set-up and it’s a lot quicker to publish a new episode. And if I were to consider paid podcast hosting, it looks like the Castos plans provide a better value for the money.

It is important to note that my opinion was formed by looking at the plugins in their basic form, without connecting to their paid services or using any other extensions.

There could be many significant differences between these plugins that are not visible on the surface.

I would love to hear from real users of these plugins. Do you disagree with my assessments in this video?

Your feedback is very welcome in the comments section.