How do their growth rates compare?

CastReader has a month-over-month growth rate of +9.8%; Explain Selected has —.

How does pricing compare?

CastReader: Freemium. Freemium. Free plan: $0 forever with 20 minutes of listening per day, standard voices up to 1.25x speed, 3 AI explains per day, and 30,000 translation characters per day when signed in. Pro: $4.99/month or $35.99/year (about $3/month, 40% saving) removing the daily listening cap, unlocking full ebooks and long PDFs, more premium voices up to 3x speed, unlimited daily explains, 120 personal-voice minutes per membership month, and 3,000,000 translation characters per month. A 3-day free trial is available; billing is via Stripe. Explain Selected: Free. Free. The extension is offered at no cost in the Chrome Web Store, with no in-app purchases listed.

What are alternatives to CastReader and Explain Selected?

Other tools in related categories include Speechify, Language Reactor, Luvvoice, Peech: Text to Speech Reader, Voice Out.

CastReader vs Explain Selected — Traffic (56K vs 0), Pricing & Verdict

Open AI Tools

CastReader vs Explain Selected — Traffic (56K vs 0), Pricing & Verdict | Open AI Tools

Side-by-Side Traffic & Specification Matrix

Dimension / Metric	CastReader	Explain Selected
Official Domain	castreader.com	chromewebstore.google.com
Pricing Model	Freemium	Free
Monthly Visits	56K (55,999)	0 (0)
MoM Traffic Delta	+4.98K (+9.8%)	0 (—)
Primary Market & Share	🇺🇸 United States (56%)	🌐 Global (—)
Direct Visits / mo	19.7K	0
User Rating	4.4	3.8
Supported Platforms	Website	Browser Extension

CastReader

Read aloud webpages, PDFs, Kindle books and AI answers with synced highlighting

Synced read-aloud

Natural AI voices narrate webpages, PDFs, ebooks and documents while each spoken word is highlighted and the page auto-scrolls, so you never lose your place.

Read & Explain

Instead of only reading a hard passage, CastReader summarises and unpacks its meaning in the language you know best, with an animated pen marking the key lines in the original text.

Wide source coverage

Works across Kindle, WeRead, Google Play Books, O'Reilly and other book platforms, news and newsletter sites, Google Docs, Notion, Gmail, plus ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek and Kimi answers.

Voice Hub and voice cloning

Preview real samples of dozens of voices across many languages, and create private cloned voices that Pro members can apply to their own PDF, EPUB, Word and TXT files.

Strengths & Pros

+Combines plain read-aloud with guided explanations that point back at the source text
+Covers an unusually broad set of sources, from Kindle and Gmail to ChatGPT and Claude answers
+Free tier is genuinely usable with no account required, and the 3-day Pro trial needs no commitment