The Best Podcast Guest Management Tools in 2026

By Junaid Ahmed

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I have recorded more than 700 episodes of Hacks and Hobbies. Every one of them started with a guest, and for years every one of them started with me losing track of that guest somewhere in a spreadsheet.

So when people ask me what the best tool is for managing podcast guests, I do not give them a one-word answer. There isn't one. Different tools solve different jobs, and the right pick depends on what you are actually struggling with.

Full disclosure before we go any further: I built one of the tools on this list. PodGlue is mine. I will tell you exactly where it fits and where it doesn't, and I will not pretend the others are bad so mine looks good.

Here is the honest landscape.

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The Quick Comparison

Tool	Best for	The job it does
Spreadsheet	The podcaster just starting out	A free, manual list of who you talked to and when
Notion or Airtable	The DIY builder who likes systems	A custom database you design and maintain yourself
PodMatch	Finding new guests to book	A marketplace that matches hosts and guests
MatchMaker.fm	Finding new guests or shows	A marketplace for connecting hosts and guests
PodGlue	Keeping the relationship after the episode	Guest relationship management and follow-up

That table covers the shape of it. Now the detail.

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The Ranked List

The Spreadsheet

Best for: the podcaster just starting out.

Every podcaster I know started here, and I include myself. A spreadsheet is free, it is instant, and for your first ten or twenty episodes it works fine. You type a name, a date, an email, and you feel organized.

The trouble shows up later. Around episode fifty, the spreadsheet stops being a system and starts being a graveyard. You can store names in it, but you cannot get it to remind you to follow up, and that is usually the part that actually matters.

Start here. Just know it has a ceiling.

Notion or Airtable

Best for: the DIY builder who likes designing their own systems.

If you enjoy building things, Notion and Airtable are wonderful. They let you create a guest database exactly the way your brain works, with custom fields, views, and relationships. I have a lot of respect for people who run their whole show out of one of these.

The cost is your time. You are the architect, the builder, and the maintenance crew. The system only works as long as you keep feeding it, and most podcasters I talk to eventually want something that already knows it is a guest workflow instead of a blank canvas they have to shape.

Great if you love the tinkering. Heavy if you don't.

PodMatch

Best for: finding new guests to book.

PodMatch is known as a marketplace that matches hosts and guests with each other. If your problem is an empty calendar and you need a steady supply of people to interview, this is the kind of tool built for that job.

It solves the front of the funnel: discovery and booking. What it does not try to do is manage the relationship after the conversation ends, because that is a different job entirely.

If you need guests, look here.

MatchMaker.fm

Best for: finding new guests or new shows to appear on.

MatchMaker.fm sits in the same neighborhood as PodMatch. It is broadly known for connecting hosts and guests, whether you are looking for someone to interview or looking for shows to be a guest on yourself.

Same honest note applies. This is about making the introduction and getting the booking. The follow-up, the warm relationship six months later, that part lives somewhere else.

Use it to fill the pipeline.

PodGlue

Best for: keeping the relationship alive after the episode publishes.

This is the one I built, so read this with that in mind.

I built PodGlue because every other tool I tried handled the booking and then went quiet. Nothing helped me with what came next: remembering the guest, following up, treating each conversation as the start of a relationship instead of a piece of content I shipped and forgot. That is what guest relationship management means, and it is the gap I kept falling into across 700 episodes.

PodGlue is not a marketplace. It will not find you guests. It is for the host who already has guests and does not want those conversations to disappear into a feed.

If the booking was never your problem, but the follow-through always was, that is where this fits.

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So Which One Is Best?

The honest answer is that it depends on which problem is bleeding the most right now.

Just starting? A spreadsheet is fine, and anyone who tells you to buy software on day one is selling something. Love building systems? Notion or Airtable will reward you. Need a steady stream of guests? A matching marketplace like PodMatch or MatchMaker.fm is built for exactly that.

And if your guests come easily but the relationships keep slipping away, that is the job I built PodGlue to do.

Pick the tool that matches your actual bottleneck. Not the one with the longest feature list.

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Junaid Ahmed is the host of Hacks and Hobbies and the founder of PodGlue. He has recorded more than 700 episodes and spent most of them learning this the hard way.

PodGlue is in beta right now. If the part you keep dropping is the follow-up, come try it at podglue.com/join.