Now&Zen vs Async (formerly Podcastle)

Embark on a unique meditation journey with Now&Zen, where bespoke meditations are designed to align seamlessly with your personal mindfulness goals. Now&Zen offers an intuitive platform that allows you to craft your very own meditation experience, customizing every detail to suit your preferences. From choosing the perfect voice to setting the right intent, Now&Zen makes it easy to create a guided meditation that resonates with your current needs.

With options for duration, voice, style, and background sounds, your session can be personalized in just minutes. Now&Zen ensures that your meditative practice is convenient and accessible, providing downloadable meditations for offline use, which means you can maintain your peace of mind anywhere, anytime. Get started with Now&Zen and tailor every meditation session to fit your mood, goals, and schedule.

Async lets you record, edit, and republish audio and video by chatting with AI instead of dragging clips on a timeline. You can capture remote podcasts, generate footage from prompts, clean up audio, add subtitles, dub content, and turn long recordings into social clips inside one browser workflow.

Where most editors split recording, transcription, and clip creation across separate apps, Async bundles them behind a chat interface called Bumblebee. You upload footage or start from a template, tell Async what to cut or generate, and it handles pacing, captions, and export. The platform also lists 100+ generative models for video, image, music, and voice, including Kling, Veo, Sora, and GPT Image 2.

The free plan includes 10 lifetime AI credits and 1 hour of media uploads, enough to test the chat editor before upgrading. Paid tiers add monthly credit pools (450 on Essentials, 1,200 on Pro, 3,000 on Teams) that meter video generation, dubbing, and other AI actions. Annual billing saves up to 40%.

Podcasters, video creators, marketing teams, and social media managers who want recording, editing, and repurposing in one place without learning traditional NLE software are the target audience. An iOS app is available, and remote recording supports up to 10 participants per session.