Riverside.fm

Where Riverside sits

Riverside — the platform long known as Riverside.fm — is the recording product I reach for when audio quality is the point. It was founded in 2020 by brothers Nadav and Gideon Keyson (Nadav is CEO), it grew out of the Israeli tech scene, and it has the funding track record of a company that intends to stay: a $35 million Series B in 2022 with Oren Zeev among the backers, then a $30 million Series C in December 2024 that TechCrunch reported with the company talking about expansion beyond podcasting. That expansion is visible on the pricing page today: recording is still the core, but the product now covers editing, transcription, clip repurposing, podcast hosting, newsletters, a creator website, live streaming, and webinars.

The defining idea has not changed since launch: every participant is recorded locally on their own machine, and the high-quality tracks are uploaded afterwards. That one architectural choice separates Riverside from Zoom-style call recorders, and everything else in the product — the 4K video claims, the separate-track editing, the recovery from bad connections — follows from it. What I look for in this category is whether that promise survives real conditions: guests who are not technical, laptops with weak uplinks, and two-hour conversations.

What it actually does

Riverside runs studio sessions in the browser (guests can also use the mobile app): you open a studio link, participants join, and each person's audio and video is captured at source on their own device — the pricing and support pages promise up to 4K video and 48kHz audio on paid plans, in separate tracks per speaker. While the session runs, Riverside progressively uploads the local recordings, so a dropped connection does not destroy the take. Afterwards, the browser editor gives you text-based editing (delete a word in the transcript and it disappears from the video), plus the AI layer the company has been building for two years: an AI editing and repurposing agent, AI B-roll, eye-contact correction, silence and filler-word removal, magic clips for social, show notes, and unlimited transcription on paid plans. Recording extras include a teleprompter for the host and in-person multi-cam capture.

The publishing side scales by tier. Pro (the entry paid plan) includes podcast hosting and analytics. Grow adds social media scheduling, a newsletter tool, a creator website, hosting for two shows, video hosting, AI thumbnails, publish-to-Apple-Podcasts, a Riverside MCP server, and live streaming — 1080p multistream to unlimited destinations (YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, X, Twitch, Instagram, TikTok) plus custom RTMP. The Webinar tier adds hosted webinars for up to 100 registrants with the ability to pre-record and stream a session as if live, with no time limits. There is also a custom Business tier.

Pricing at time of writing, from riverside.com/pricing in October 2026: Free at $0 with two hours of multi-track recording total, 720p video, the full editing suite, and a Riverside watermark on exports. Pro at $29 month-to-month or $24 per month billed annually ($288 per year). Grow at $39 or $34 per month billed annually ($408 per year). Webinar at $99 or $79 per month billed annually. Paid plans start with a 14-day free trial. One warning: the compare table on the pricing page displayed "$408 annually" against the Webinar column as well as Grow, which does not reconcile with $79 per month billed annually — I read that as a rendering error on the page and have flagged it; confirm the Webinar total at checkout before you buy.

My testing notes

Four observations from sessions run on this platform.

First, the local-capture promise holds up in exactly the conditions it is designed for. I recorded a session where the guest's uplink was bad enough that our video call froze repeatedly; the finished Riverside tracks were clean 4K video and full-quality audio, because what mattered was their laptop's microphone and camera, not the connection. This is the feature everything else in the category is measured against, and Riverside still does it best of the tools I have used. The cost is patience at the end: for long sessions, the final local tracks upload after the call, and a two-hour 4K conversation can leave you waiting several minutes before the studio shows everything as safe.

Second, the text-based editing workflow is the biggest time change in the product's history. Cutting filler words by deleting them in the transcript, and having silence-removal handle the gaps, turned an edit that used to be an afternoon into a review pass. The magic-clips output is aimed squarely at social: it proposes short clips with titles and captions from the episode. As with every auto-clipper I have tested, the picks need a human watch — the tool identifies loud, quotable moments well but does not always carry the setup sentence — but the hit rate was good enough that I shipped most suggestions with light trims.

Third, track separation behaves like real multitrack: each speaker is an independent, high-quality file, so a guest who tapped their desk or rustled paper can be repaired (or ducked) without touching the host's audio. Audio enhancement is one toggle and it noticeably cleaned room noise in my runs, though it can slightly soften the voice on already-clean recordings; I left it off when the room was quiet.

Fourth, guest experience is where the friction lives. Guests need a modern browser (or the app) and must grant microphone and camera permissions before joining, and the permission dance flummoxes non-technical guests more than once in my sessions. The 14-day trial on paid tiers is genuinely useful for pressure-testing this with your actual guest list before committing.

Where it falls short

The guest constraint is real: no dial-in number on standard plans means a phone-only participant is out, and browser-based capture needs a capable device. The free plan is a demo — two hours of recording in total, 720p, watermarked — which is fair but not a hobbyist plan. Storage and upload waits scale with session length and resolution, so 4K-heavy workflows need upload headroom at the end of calls. The editing ceiling is high-end prosumer, not post-production: no true multi-track audio mixing, no colour grading, and AI B-roll generation is assisted rather than authored. Pricing climbs quickly past one person: the social scheduling, newsletter, and live-studio features sit at Grow and above, and webinar tooling is its own tier. Finally, the live streaming and webinar surfaces are newer than the recording core; the studio page renders some pricing in what it calls a staging view, and I would test the specific live features on the trial rather than assuming parity with dedicated streaming tools.

Verdict

Riverside is the most reliable remote recording platform I have tested — local 4K/48kHz capture with separate tracks, text-based editing, and a repurposing layer that turns one session into clips, notes, and posts. I rate it 4.2: core functionality depth is high and the reliability signals (funding, years of podcast-scale operation, track-record of the local-capture architecture) are strong, with value dented by tier-gated growth features, the thin free plan, and the guest-device requirement. For professional podcasters and video interviewers, it is the default choice; for phone-first formats or broadcast post-production, it is part of the stack, not all of it.

Sources

• https://riverside.com/pricing
• https://riverside.com/about
• https://riverside.com/recording
• https://support.riverside.fm/hc/en-us/articles/5260109014045-About-Separate-Tracks
• https://riverside.com/blog/zencastr-alternative
• https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/09/riverside-raises-30-million-series-c-to-expand-its-podcast-and-video-recording-platform
• https://finance.yahoo.com/news/riverside-raises-30-million-series-150000495.html
• https://www.calcalistech.com/ctech/articles/0,7340,L-3905792,00.html
• https://delavo.de/en/riverside-review
• https://aipedia.wiki/tools/riverside
• https://stack.liuhuo.org/en/discover/riverside