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  • My vote will always side with the open source community so please take that with a grain of sand. I much prefer Jellyfin because of its status as an open source project.

  • If you're happy with Jellyfin I don't see a reason to switch. But if you're missing something, do checkout Plex.

  • I personally use jellyfin and it works well enough for me to watch my movies and shows. I don't use the app but just use the browser but there are plugins for kodi and various apps too.

    Ive not used Plex myself and from what I have read it does the job too. A few friends use it and are happy. I read recently they let go of 20% of their staff.

    For me it comes down to it like this: do I want a company to have control over my viewing experience with closed source software or do I want a community FOSS experience under my control. That is very important to me but it depends on your own needs.

    https://www.rapidseedbox.com/blog/jellyfin-vs-plex

  • The FOSS crowd will eventually pop in and try sway you strongly the other way, but at the end of the day, it really boils down to bigger platform, more app choices and more supported platforms. If you expect anyone other than yourself to be using it, on anywhere else other than your own equipments, but just don’t quite know who or where yet, then Plex might give you a better running chance in supporting that use case. Otherwise, choose whichever one floats your boat more.

    • The FOSS crowd will eventually pop in and try sway you strongly the other way

      That's pretty clear from the comments/upvotes, but I don't think it's undeserved either. Jellyfin is the underdog that came to take the slack left by Plex growing discontent, does a decent job overall, and gets measurably better over time.

      What's interesting to me is to think about what Plex could do that an active community around jellyfin couldn't, and the answer is not technical, but commercial, and along the lines of more partnership and integrations with hardware or streaming platforms, for which I (and most people here, apparently) have no use. YMMV of course.

  • I decided to go with Plex because I can use it from my roku TVs and my game consoles. I let a few friends and family members log in as well to stream and they're primarily doing it from game consoles. Most of those people don't even have a desktop PC. Granted, I don't know what features in that ballpark that Jellyfin may have now, I set this up a long time ago and just haven't really given it much thought since then.

  • For me, the biggest selling point with Plex was that it was so readily available on TVs and other devices. I can basically throw it at almost anything. I also occasionally share access to my Plex with friends, so that ease of use carries over to them too. It's great at getting subtitles I might be missing too, which is a big deal (my wife and I have subtitles enabled for basically everything).

    tl;dr - easy onboarding for everyone and broad compatibility.

  • I use Plex for (1) home library, (2) Live TV (HDHomerun), and (3) music (PlexAmp).

    (1) Jellyfin is just as capable for home streaming of my home library.
    (2) It would take approximately 15 seconds to show my live TV when I switch stations. Plex is almost instant and Plex has ad supported channels similar to a PlutoTV, et. al. I watch Scripps News and NBC Now along side my locals.
    (3) There simply is no app as good as PlexAmp.

    Finally, setting up Plex for outside access was dead simple, Jellyfin takes some effort.

    • Do you know how PlexAmp compares to airsonic-advanced/navidrome/subsonic? That's definitely an area where jellyfin is weak but great alternatives are out there.

      • I haven't used those apps in a long time, so my experience is pretty dated. PlexAmp is very very good though.

  • Jellyfin if you do not like being spied on by your self hosted media library. Plex if you do like being spied on by your self hosted media library.

    Also - Plex if you want Audiobooks, because the app Prologue is 🔥

  • I tried setting up both for a local music server last year, and found Plex's cloud requirements and constant upselling were more of a pain than it was worth. Jellyfin was the one I kept.

    • I was left unimpressed by jellyfin's photo and video capabilities. Tags detection often was inconsistent/incomplete and metadata retrieval to fill the gaps made things worse in many instances. If you want something specialized for audio, that has great support client side, you should give airsonic-advanced/navidrome/subsonic a shot

124 comments