What DAW is most commonly used for podcasting? Would Pro Tools be the one for the biggest companies?

I would assume Reaper.
Podcasting is a low budget operation, Reaper fits right down there!!

I did a live weekly "internet radio" show for almost 5 years, which after the fact became a podcast, and I've done several one-off podcasts and dozens of live-streaming concerts since then. I use Pro Tools, which works great. But I didn't pick PT for that job; I had it and knew it and there was no reason not to use it.

Many years ago I worked for Compaq. At the time one of my jobs was to setup and facilitate their internal and external webcasts. This was before the turn of the century. We would use SoundForge to record everything and then make downloadable and streaming versions that sync'd to PPT slides.

Low budget was key. Getting the information out was the big thing. These days Zoom pretty much does everything I did automatically.

Most editing companies are essentially a collection of freelancers who use the program they are most familiar with. Adobe Audition is probably the most commonly used as a lot of people have Adobe subscriptions.

Guessing most use Adobe Audition for their podcasts, vlogs, and Youtube videos, because it's part of the Adobe subscription.

But I use Protools for my stuff because I'm not a rube. I never really liked Audition after they bought it from Cool Edit. But I started out very early on using Cool Edit Pro back in 2002. But Protools is way better.

I fear it is Audacity.

In freelance world, people bounce between REAPER, Audacity, Garageband... anything.

I can confirm that most of the recognizable "companies" use Pro Tools. That's what's taught in the major broadcasting schools, and it's specifically sought out when hiring, though not really for any good reason. It's a cause of headaches, more than anything else.

The major podcast studios use Pro Tools.
Randoms making podcasts at home could be using anything

The good reason is it's easier to collaborate when everyone's on one system and most professionals know it. Being an industry standard doesn't mean it's the best software on the market for all types of work, but it does simplify a lot of things.

100%.

Though I might argue that so many of these projects are so stupid-simple (advertisement, then voiceover, then music, then interview, then ads...) that it's about time to collectively switch from ProTools to something that "just works". If I had a dollar for every client calling me about the damn thing crashing mid interview, or a field engineer losing an iLok...

...but then we get into a line of conversation we've all been down before. I don't actually have anything new to say.

obs with reaper vst plugins

What a maniac

Actually the ease of collaborating when everyone's using the same platform is why my podcast team (and I assume, many others) uses Reaper. When you decide to start a podcast and you don't have budget for the several people who may need project access to become PT users, Reaper is an obvious choice. I also find that Reaper's editing tools/workflow, while not my fave for music production, are a fabulous fit for intensive editing of VO tracks.

(Though granted, that doesn't really address the OP's question, since we're a one-off organizational operation, not a "podcast company" -- I didn't even realize there were such things.)

Adobe Audition has a pretty big following among smaller market broadcasters.
Podcasts share many of the same requirements, so I'd say anybody who does
podcasts and isn't doing them from their bedroom would be looking seriously
at AA.

Independent podcasters are probably using whatever they know and can afford. I would guess fewer of them use Pro Tools than you might imagine. I suspect Adobe Audition is used a lot because many broadcast journalists of a certain age cut their teeth on free versions of Cool Edit. I imagine their younger colleagues are using Audacity instead, because free is free.

Some podcasts originate with major broadcast organizations, and the bigger the organization, the more likely they are to have standardized on something that you wouldn't expect if you're coming from a music studio background.

For large organizations, Magix Sequoia makes a strong case for itself. Unless you're a classical engineer who needs non-destructive 3-and 4-point edits to assemble multiple takes that weren't recorded to click, or you're a mastering engineer whose life revolves around PQ codes and DDP files, you're unlikely to have considered this DAW. After all, everything else you might care about for ordinary music production works exactly the same in Samplitude, which costs 1/5 the price. But a significant portion of the Sequoia installed base consists of large broadcast organizations, because Sequoia includes a ton of broadcast-specific features. Examples include: strong support for loudness normalization, network sharing of audio clips, integration with broadcast automation systems, automatic batch processing, triggering of audio cue playback while recording a show, and the ability to be playing the front of a project live on-air while you're still editing the end of it. More details here.

A DAW like Sequoia makes sense for a large organization that employs a cadre of professional audio editors, but the learning curve is pretty steep for your average independent broadcast journalist. They need something that's lightning fast and very easy to understand, like Cool Edit used to be, but with the capability of handling modern broadcast concerns. It turns out that there's a DAW built specifically for them: Hindenburg is a fairly new DAW that was built from the ground up for exactly this use case.

David L. Rick

Audition is very popular in professional radio broadcast facilities. ProTools is there too, but not as widely used because radio is no longer as viable, and money is extremely tight.

You won't find much Audacity in radio, it's just too hobbled, and radio is very much a time=money business. Pay a little more for a familiar and fast tool, and you end up on the green side of the budget overall.