Riverside Reviews 446

I have mixed feelings about Riverside.fm.
On the positive side, once you get past the initial learning curve, the platform is relatively straightforward to use. I leaned on a friend’s tips and advice early on, which helped significantly. After that, things clicked. I’ve consistently received compliments that my podcast both sounds professional and looks polished, which is a major win and one of the primary reasons I’ve stuck with the platform.
That said, there are some meaningful drawbacks. The platform can be quite glitchy, particularly when it comes to uploading videos and making edits. Upload times are especially frustrating—despite messaging that uploads should take only a few minutes, I’ve had them take over 24 hours. Additionally, the AI tools are underwhelming. Features like highlights and magic clips sound great in theory, but in practice they’re not very effective or reliable.
The biggest issue by far is customer service. Riverside advertises 24/7 support, but in reality I’ve often waited 48 hours or more for responses to time-sensitive technical issues, such as problems linking my Spotify account. When responses do come, they’re frequently generic and feel AI-generated, which leads to long back-and-forth email chains before you get anywhere close to a real solution.
Overall, Riverside.fm delivers on production quality, but the technical glitches and poor support experience make it hard to rate higher than three stars.

As a first time podcaster, this platform is so easy to use out of the box. The transcriptions, meeting set-ups, in-person or remote recordings, the sound-bites, video-bites, summary after the podcast is recorded, the easy editing (because I've never edited a video in my life) have made starting a podcast easy and fun. It allows me to focus on the guests and the marketing to grow listeners.
I really appreciate how the Riverside team strives to provide value every week and their documentation is fabulous. As someone who's worked in tech for 10 years, this is everything a tech-based company should be.

Very good app to record podcasts, specially with more than one person.

The best platform out there. So easy to use, safes my time and so many options.

The blight of SaaS on society needs to change. where companies like Riverside.fm collect even if somebody doesn't log in a single time in a given month.

Laws need to be put in place so that companies have an incentive to not enter into money extraction businesses like Riverside.fm.

We've all done it, we sign up for a free trial, get distracted... and next thing we know we've spent $50, $120, and far more sometimes, without ever getting any value close to what we spent.

SaaS companies obviously know a reasonable percent of their income comes from these scenarios.

Just need a law. If somebody doesn't log in for a month, you can't charge them for that month. Simple.

Be aware, they put you on auto-renewal and then do not send any reminder messages. When you ask for a refund they quote hidden terms and conditions. Eventually, under threat of chargeback, they refund but deduct more than pro-rata. Video is laggy when using the iPhone as a camera but despite tech requests, there’s no solution forthcoming.

The concept is brilliant - but (unless you have a gigantic appetite for frustration and failure) the platform doesn't live up to the promise.

The recording feature is horrendous. Guests have to wait for hours with the app open after the conversation/ recording to "upload" his/her/their recording. If they need to rush somewhere, then you simply cannot access the conversation. The end. And nothing you do can change that. Although tech support will make all the right noises, they are largely ineffective.

It IS possible for you to access the separate tracks from Riverside cloud backup - but you have to put them together yourself which, of course, takes hours and hours. And why would you use Riverside to do that when there are 1001 apps that will record the entire conversation in one track for you to use in minutes.

My suggestion if you like the editing features (and there are some things to like here), is to record somewhere else, upload to Riverside, use what you want, and then use another software to finish.

Overall, for me, the fails outweigh the benefits. My recommendation would be to steer clear and look elsewhere. Or at the very least go in with your eyes open and beware that what you think you are getting may not be so.

Update on 3 March 2026: I'm upgrading my rating to a 3 because the updates seem to have fixed some of the problems I experience previously, and am more than happy with these.

Ease of use, learning the process and the quality of the whole experience.

The platform is awesome ... when it works. That's about 50% of the time. Support is beyond useless. They can never address anything online and they take days to get back to you by email. When they do reach out by email you end up having to explain everything ALL OVER AGAIN to people that clearly do not speak English as a first language (normally, that's not even a small problem, but when you're forced to write lengthy emails to get anything addressed, it's a REAL problem). The most frustrating part is they keep recommending the same steps over and over even though you've already established that the "fix" they keep repeating DOES NOT WORK. Horrible support. Horrible platform stability. Horrible attitude from their executives and managers who just ignore your requests to speak with them. "Hey, we have their money... why should we listen to them complain?" If you love abusive relationships, Riverside is for you.

Riverside has been an a really easy all in one podcast studio! Anytime I've had any sort of issue they have sorted it out really quick. Everything is very straight forward and they have lots of great tools to help along the way.

I had an interview lined up with a New York Times Bestselling author for my radio show/podcast. The system sent out dead links and I could not get it fixed at the scheduled time. Fortunately the guest was kind enough to agree to reschedule the following morning. I contacted tech support to try to get the problem fixed. After looking into it for about 3 minutes, the agent said the team needed to look into it further and would email me when they had an answer. Again...the system was totally unusable. When I asked her for a timeframe or some kind of potential next steps, she just repeated canned responses about being "sorry for my frustration." Ultimately I had no choice but to cancel the service. There was no one there to work me though the issue...a fundamental issue that put me in a completely untenable situation and made my work impossible. Whether these are systematic issues with Riverside, whether they have become complacent, or whether this was was one incredibly subpar agent...they lost my business. I'd encourage you to find an alternative.

From the beginning, Riverside has been nothing but problems. While recording, sessions would randomly stop recording, and the guests and I would have to start all over. Then upon uploading, video and audio would get out of sync and have to be manually corrected by my producer. And now, after paying them monthly to store old recordings, I finally went in to archive everything, and it's taken weeks of back and forth with support to get media files restored. The cherry on top was one podcast episode seems to have just disappeared from their archives and is unfindable.

They always told me it was on my end. You need to close all your other applications or browser windows, etc. etc. etc.

For context, all recordings were done on a MacBook M1 Pro with 32 GB of RAM using a Nikon Mirrorless camera with a Camlink interface.

The only thing this platform was supposed to do, they could not do.

Crap… its the only word that comes to mi mind.

Fine software. But allways has bugs, problems, sudden video dissapearing, and lots of back and forth with support.

What a great editing platform for beginners like myself, even over 50 tears old person with no experience.

I'd love to give this company NO stars. Ignorant customer service experience - NO experience with the product/service at all. SOMEONE had charged my card for using Riverside... and I'd evidently been paying for it, for 5 months. When I contacted them to inquire & stop the monthly charges, it was a complete CIRCUS. They kept referring to "my account" and "my subscription"... which I never had. Utterly infuriating. FOUR "customer service" reps asked me for the same information multiple times, via an ignorant email thread that NONE of them were actually READING. Wouldn't use their "service even if I needed it.

The support from the team is epic as Im not a technical person. The recording are reliable with video quality and sound. They are constantly adding features which is really great. The new layouts is very handy. Pricing is fair.

Appalling software that takes forever to use, and constantly bugs. A third of our recordings have failed owing to riverside software issues. Our latest has been waiting for riverside tech to fix for days, now with no response. Having paid £500 for this rubbish I am deeply disappointed. Do not buy this junk!

Good idea, badly done. They make it very difficult to DOWNLOAD a recorded episode with someone I shared it with & the support is not really helpful.