Anchor (now called Spotify for Podcasters) is a popular choice among new podcasters. It markets itself as a podcasting platform for streaming free content. Anchor answers the question of where to post podcasts for free but only partially. Anchor podcast hosting is free but offers limited flexibility as you grow. 

If your podcast has outgrown Anchor’s capabilities, we have an Anchor alternative that will suit your needs. Hubhopper has all the tools you need to make a great podcast, distribute it everywhere easily and save creation time. 

In this blog, we have podcast hosts compared: Anchor vs Hubhopper.

Anchor Limiting Your Podcast? Switch to the #1 Anchor Alternative

Features	Hubhopper	Spotify for Podcasters
Automated distribution	✅	Only to Spotify
Unlimited podcasts	✅	❌
Monetization	Private podcasts & DAI	Limited to some regions
Ease of episodes creation with AI	✅	❌
Marketing collateral creation with AI	✅	❌
High file quality	✅	❌
Control over ads in your episodes	✅	❌
Team members	✅	✅
Private podcasting	✅	❌
Record and edit audio	✅	❌
Exclusive distribution partners	✅	❌
Canva Cover Art Creation	✅	❌
Microsite (podcast website)	Only your branding	Prevalent Spotify branding
Low latency downloads	✅	❌
Podcasting 2.0	✅	❌
Headliner integration	✅	❌
Customisable RSS feeds	✅	❌
Migration of your existing podcast	✅	✅
Episode transcripts	✅	❌
Unlimited Downloads	✅	✅
YouTube Distribution	✅	❌
GDPR Compliant	✅	✅
Episode scheduling	✅	✅
Apple Podcast Distribution	One-click distribution	Lengthy
Embedded player	Functional and elegant	Simple and basic
Podcast Analytics	✅	✅

The Anchor podcast platform offers basic tools but lacks advanced controls.

Limited distribution

Anchor only distributes your podcast to Spotify automatically. If you want to distribute your podcast to other platforms, you’d have to publish your podcast manually using the RSS feed URL they will provide as your podcast hosting platform.

While Spotify is one of the top podcast listening platforms, limiting your distribution to Spotify poses some problems: 

• There are other global as well as emerging platforms that your show should be on like Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, JioSaavn, YouTube, YouTube music, etc.
• All your listens and downloads would be drastically affected by Spotify’s algorithm. 
• Your audience prefers to listen to podcasts on the platform of their choice. If you’re not everywhere, you’ll fail to capture your audience in their entirety.

As an anchor alternative, Hubhopper distributes your podcast to 20+ platforms like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, YouTube Music, Castbox, PocketCasts, Overcast, JioSaavn, Gaana, etc.

With us, we put your podcast everywhere so you can capture each segment of your audience, irrespective of their podcast player preference.

Lengthy Apple Podcast distribution process

Apple Podcasts is a top podcast player and is a popular preference among US podcast listeners. Spotify does not directly enable you to distribute your podcast. You would need to create an Apple ID and then an account on Apple Podcasts for Creators, followed by linking your RSS feed to successfully list your podcast on Apple Podcasts.

Hubhopper cuts through all of that and distributes your podcast with a single click. As one of Apple’s participating podcast hosting providers, you don’t need to make an Apple ID and follow a lengthy process to list your podcast on Apple Podcasts. Enjoy the ease of distribution with Hubhopper.

No YouTube distribution

Anchor natively has video podcasting capability where you upload your video and people can watch it on Spotify. But your video will not be distributed to YouTube. You would need to separately upload your video to YouTube which is time consuming. But, is being on YouTube important for you?

Data says yes. YouTube has overtaken Spotify for podcast consumption. 33% podcast listeners prefer YouTube compared to 27% listeners who prefer Spotify. If you don’t distribute your podcast to YouTube, you’re missing out on a significant chunk of your potential audience.

With Hubhopper, you can upload your video and it will be distributed to YouTube. The audio will automatically be extracted and distributed to audio podcast listening platforms. Why make your distribution time consuming when it can be hassle-free?

Lower file quality

It doesn’t matter which audio format you upload your episode in on Spotify, the platform will encode it as M4A file at a low fidelity. What does that mean for your episode? The episode will be of lower quality than your original file.

As a beginner you may not worry about it but as you scale and invest time, money, and effort in the content and audio quality, it will be a cause of concern.

Hubhopper doesn’t lower the audio quality at all. We support MP4, WAV, MP3, and FLAC files. Your audio quality remains the same and your audience will hear exactly what you recorded and edited.

No episode transcripts

Transcriptions are helpful when you’re creating marketing collaterals like blogs, emails, newsletters, and social media posts. Spotify does not give you transcripts of your episode that you can export. It could either mean you need to manually create your transcript or subscribe to a third party software.

Either way you would be spending more time creating transcripts, but there is an easier and faster way to get them.

Hubhopper gives you the transcript of your episode in minutes. You don’t need to go outside the platform to get your transcript which means you’re not spending extra money and saving time too.

One account, one podcast

Spotify only lets you manage one podcast with one account. As a beginner, you want to focus on one podcast and grow it. As you gain prowess as a podcaster, you have more ideas and avenues you want to explore. You might want to explore more niches and truly let your creativity shine.

With Hubhopper being the best Anchor alternative, you can manage unlimited podcasts with one account. Try out as many ideas you want with Hubhopper and let the data speak for itself. Double down on the podcast that is picking up and build on your ideas later. 

If you’re a podcast producer with various clients, Spotify can be very restrictive and will require you to switch accounts. Hubhopper on the other hand gives you all the podcasts you’re managing on one dashboard, making switching between different projects easy.

Heavily branded podcast website

Anchor helps you make a podcast website but it is heavily branded with Spotify for Creators branding. A podcast website is all about solidifying your own brand, strengthening your reach via SEO and sending it to potential sponsors. If your website has a third-party’s branding, it doesn’t look professional and distracts from your brand too.

As an Anchor alternative, Hubhopper’s podcast website gives you all the control. You can customize your website and have your own branding, which includes fonts, themes, and theme colours. You can also add your custom subdomain and favicon, to truly make your website your own.

Plain and simple embed player

The embed players by Anchor are plain and simple. You only get the ability to pause, play, and move to the next or previous episode. Plus, Anchor has their branding on the embed player too.

Hubhopper’s embed player has more functionality than Anchor’s embed player. You can increase the speed, forward, rewind, pause, play, control the volume, and share. You can also remove Hubhopper’s branding from your embed player.

No control over ads on your episodes

Spotify will put ads on your podcasts and you don’t have a say on it yet. Which means, your podcast can be used to advertise brands that are contrarian to your point of view which can lead to confusion at best and mistrust at worst among your ardent listeners. Why do they do that?

Because Anchor being a free platform, Spotify needs to earn money through some way and as a streaming platform it either comes through ads or premium memberships.

With Hubhopper, you have full control over the ads that play in your episodes. Our Dynamic Audio Insertion feature puts you in the driving seat when it comes to stitching ads in your episodes. Simply add your sponsor’s audio in the pre or post roll of the selected or all episodes. Track the impressions of the audio and once you hit the promised impressions, simply remove the ad from all the episodes. 

Complicated sign up process

You’ll need a Spotify for Creator login to access its advanced features. But creating an anchor app podcast account can be unnecessarily complicated. You can have a look at this blog. Getting started and uploading episodes is a bit complicated. Plus the only place Anchor will automatically distribute your podcast to is Spotify. 

With Hubhopper, the sign up process is simple and easy. You can create and start your podcast in just five minutes. Plus, you distribute your podcast to 10+ platforms with just one click, which means you spend less time in the mundane processes and maximize the output.

Limited Monetization

Anchor currently has not made monetization accessible to all regions. It doesn’t mean that your episode will not have ads. But, if monetization is not available in your region, you probably won’t get the share of the pie.

With Hubhopper, you get two avenues for podcast monetization. DAI and private podcasts. DAI is when you can stitch your sponsor’s ads to pre- or post-roll of your episodes (you can choose all or select the ones you wish to). Once you meet the impressions you promised your sponsor, simply remove the ad from your chosen episodes. 

Private podcasts facilitate exclusive content that you can put behind a paywall. The interested listeners can pay for the exclusive content and access it.

Both these avenues give you complete control over your content and how much you make. Hubhopper does not take any share of the revenue you generate.

Lacks AI Features

Spotify does not have any AI features to make your podcasting workflow faster and easier. It means you can’t edit your audio with AI, create social media captions, and even show notes for your episode. Manually doing these tasks can be an uphill battle. 

Hubhopper offers the best way to make a podcast with minimum effort through AI tools. With Hubhopper you can:

• Edit your audio like a document
• Create SEO optimized show notes
• Generate transcripts of your episode
• Get AI generated social media captions to promote your show on Instagram, LinkedIn and X

Hubhopper features you’ll love

Among podcast hosting companies, Hubhopper stands out for growing podcasters.

Easy migration

Migrating your show onto Hubhopper is very easy. You can either use your RSS feed or search your podcast. After a simple email verification and 301 redirect, your podcast is migrated! You won’t lose any followers or subscribers and your listeners will not even know that you switched your podcast hosting platform.

Unlimited downloads and storage

Hubhopper doesn’t limit you. If your downloads soar, we will not charge you extra. If you want more storage to store your draft episodes, you can have all the storage you want. You don’t need to keep track of your downloads or storage and can create podcasts without worrying about the nitty gritties.

Advanced Analytics

Hubhopper gives you comprehensive analytics to help you keep track of your podcast’s performance, give insights about your audience, and make the necessary tweak to your strategy and approach. In your advanced analytics dashboard you get:-

• Podcast performance
• Hourly performance of your podcast
• Custom date ranges
• Episode performance (compare up to five episodes in a selected date range)
• Locations of your audience (country and cities)
• Unique listeners
• Devices your audience are using to listen
• Platform wise breakdown of your listens and downloads
• Ability to export your analytics as CSV
• Ability to add tracking prefixes for analytics software like Podtrac

Hubhopper – The Best Choice to Grow Your Podcast

As a beginner, Anchor is great to get you started, but as you read it comes with many limitations. As you grow, you need a podcast hosting platform that gives you complete control over your content. When it comes to Hubhopper vs Spotify, serious creators prefer flexibility and control. If you’re seeking the best podcast platform to scale your growth, choose Hubhopper.