Castr vs BoxCast: the best BoxCast alternative for churches and schools

The best BoxCast alternative depends on what is limiting you. For teams running recurring services, meetings, or game days, Castr removes the streaming-hour cap, covers 2 to 15 concurrent streams by plan and 6 to 30 destinations account-wide, and puts password protection, the pay-per-view paywall, and an unbranded white-label player on every plan, on month-to-month billing. BoxCast is still the better answer if you want turnkey hardware, automated live captioning on the plan you are buying, or browser-based audio mixing. Compare several BoxCast alternatives, then test the shortlist on a real broadcast rather than on a feature grid.

BoxCast is a live streaming platform aimed at houses of worship, sports, local government, and business. Teams use it to stream recurring events with scheduling, cloud transcoding, simulcasting to social, an embeddable player, and branded OTT apps, often paired with its own Spark hardware encoder and its patented BoxCast Flow protocol for unreliable venue networks. It also sells Mixing Station for remote audio mixing, checked July 2026.

BoxCast says its paid streaming plans start at $109 per month billed annually, and its published tiers run Standard at $109, Deluxe at $169, Advanced at $249, and 4K at $449, each about $10 to $50 higher on monthly billing. The tier matters more than the entry price, because password protection, geo-blocking, embedding restrictions, API access, live captioning, and 1080p60 all begin on Advanced. OTT Apps is a separate subscription from $25 per month, and BoxCast prices concurrent streams, extended broadcast duration, live captioning, and the Multi-Site Player as add-ons on top. Castr plans start at $19.99 per month on monthly billing or $16.67 billed annually, and Starter includes a 7-day trial that needs no credit card.

Castr does not have a permanently free plan. Starter includes a 7-day trial that needs no credit card, so you can run a real broadcast on Castr without paying and without turning off the platform carrying this week's service. After the trial, plans start at $19.99 per month month-to-month with no long-term contract required. BoxCast also offers a free trial, which it says carries the Advanced feature set, plus a 30-day money-back guarantee on paid plans.

Castr does not cap streaming hours, so a stream can run as long as the event does, and every plan includes a TV playout channel for continuous programming. Bandwidth is what governs usage, at 200 GB to 10 TB per month by plan with custom volume beyond that. BoxCast describes a usual 8-hour window for a broadcast and sells Extended Broadcast Duration, up to 24 hours, as a $100 per month add-on.

Yes. Castr plans include 2 to 15 concurrent live streams on monthly billing and 3 to 15 on annual billing, so a second campus, an overflow room, and a simultaneous game can each have their own feed. BoxCast lists 1 concurrent broadcast on Standard and Deluxe and 3 on Advanced and 4K, with extra concurrent broadcasts priced at $50 per month per stream.

You need an encoder, but not a specific one. Castr accepts RTMP, RTMPS, SRT, and WHIP from any compatible encoder, including OBS, Wirecast, and vMix, and can pull from RTMP, HLS, RTSP, or MPEG-TS. Spark, the BoxCast Broadcaster app, and Producer are tied to BoxCast, so confirm what you will use for contribution before you switch. Many teams keep the camera and audio chain exactly as it is and change only where the feed is pointed.

Export them before you cancel. BoxCast stores recorded broadcasts for 90 days on Standard and one year on Deluxe, Advanced, and 4K, and 4K recordings for 30 days, so an archive older than the retention window on your plan may no longer be there. On the Castr side, storage is sized by capacity at 100 GB to 3 TB by plan, and cloud recordings should be moved into hosting because a recording is held up to three days.

Inventory your broadcasts, recurring schedules, encoder settings, social destinations, embeds, recordings, and access rules, then map each requirement to the right Castr plan. Export the archive you want to keep, point your encoder at Castr over RTMP or SRT, and run a parallel broadcast on a midweek service with BoxCast still live. Update embeds and cut over only once that test passes. The Castr video team plans the migration with you and confirms supported scope, responsibilities, and timing during discovery.

BoxCast may be the better fit when you want a turnkey encoder and a vendor that will walk a volunteer through setup by phone, when automated live captioning has to be included rather than scoped, or when you rely on BoxCast Flow to hold a stream together on a venue network that fights you. It is also the sensible answer when the current setup is working and nothing about it is costing you. If what is costing you is the broadcast window, the single concurrent stream, or the plan the access controls sit on, the trial will tell you more than another comparison page will.

Castr is a strong BoxCast alternative for teams that have outgrown the limits around the broadcast rather than the broadcast itself. You get no streaming-hour cap, 2 to 15 concurrent streams by plan, 6 to 30 destinations account-wide, SRT and WHIP contribution, a white-label Dynamic Player with no platform branding on any plan, password protection and paywall on every plan, and delivery across Akamai, Fastly, and CloudFront behind a 99.9% uptime SLA, all on month-to-month billing. BoxCast remains a good fit for turnkey encoders, included live captioning, and venue-based production.