Selfhosted

Jellyfin:

• Free
• Gets the job done
• Not in financial trouble
• No layoffs
• Not trying to sell you stuff
• Not selling your watch habbits
• Mainly develops features people want

Plex (paid):

• Decade of development with pretty solid pay features
• Easy sharing with friends and remote watching
• Decent clients for almost every device and more solid transcoding
• Fairly quick fixes for problems
• Great intro/credit/commercial skipping
• Only develops features that might make money
• In the middle of layoffs
• Centralized authentication makes is impossible to watch if offline or they're offline unless you removed local authentication before it went offline.
• They sell your viewing habbits

Plex is super convenient and slimy

Jellyfin is pure and behind on features, clients and comforts.

Jellyfin is only getting better while Plex is primarily getting worse. You also need to pay for Plex to get many features Jellyfin provides for free.

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.

I used Plex for years.

As soon as I tried Jellyfin with a limited section of my library I was immediately finished with Plex.

1. Jellyfin works with no internet connection with no stuffing around
2. The app is far quicker and more responsive and IMO it looks world's better
3. It handles mixed media libraries better
4. A vastly larger selection of my library can be played with zero transcoding in Jellyfin. Less load on my server, less load on my client, less load on my drives and a far, far more responsive UI as a result.

You owe it to yourself to try jellyfin. It's amazing.

What are the main advantages to plex?

AFAIK they offer more apps resp. apps for more platforms. Apart from that, nothing really. Maybe a little more idiot-proof.

Jellyfin is better. Plex has features behind paywall

I switched from Plex to Jellyfin several years ago and haven't really looked back. Overall I just didn't like the direction plex kept going (pushing shit streaming services, central auth, paywalling features), and dropped it even though I grabbed a lifetime plex pass back in the day. The only thing I miss about plex was the ease of developing a custom plugin for it since you could pretty much just drop python scripts in there and have it work, though their documentation for plugin development was terrible (and I think removed from their site entirely).

As a jellyfin user, I have to say that it sometimes brings more trouble than it solves. Especially for non-admin users

I have run both Plex and Jellyfin and I much prefer Jellyfin. I got sick of Plex content being interjected into my menus and feed. Plex also had issues seeing my server which was inconvenient. I now run Jellyfin with Infuse as my client. Love it so far.

Why not get both (free teir on Plex), and decide for yourself?

If you want another opinion from an internet stranger though:

tl;dr: Plex if want simple seamless integration, and are prepared to spend money.

Jellyfin if you want FOSS, but are prepared to spend time.

I run both Jellyfin and Plex, and I only use Plex. It's more polished, has more clients, and has less bugs than Jellyfin. Plus, there are more community applications that are built around Plex vs Jellyfin.

For example, if you want to share your Jellyfin server, you have to manually forward ports, setup DNS records, dynamic DNS services, maybe reverse proxying, just to get easy access outside your network. Meanwhile, Plex is more or less plug and play (you might need to forward a port if the automatic port forward doesn't work)

That being said, I have the lifetime Plex Pass, and I don't think the monthly subscription for Plex is worth it.

I have a ton of friends that use my Jellyfin server instead of Plex, just because the Jellyfin mobile apps are free, so I keep Jellyfin running even though I don't personally use it.

If you decide to go with Plex, I would highly recommend getting the lifetime pass instead of a subscription.

I really have only ever used either of them as a DLNA server, but I was recently forced into Jellyfin and find that I like it much better than Plex. It's faster and more reliable on my system, and for my stripped-down needs, it's a perfect fit. I'd say that if Jellyfin is doing the job you need, you've got absolutely no reason to switch.

Currently just using Jellyfin, but have used both Plex and Emby in the past.

Main reason I switched from Plex was mobile support. I also prefer FinAmp, which I use to download music for access when I'm at work, and at home I can access my entire collection through the same app.

I recommend setting up everything through Docker. I have Portainer running, which helps manage the containers. It was pretty trivial to switch what I was using by just setting up a different container. You can also have both running at the same time off the same library, and see what you prefer.

My experience with Jellyfin have not been great. The mobile app is just not working well enough

Plex has lots of customisation available (which I prefer) but is a little harder to get running in my experience. I'd say, install them both and see what you like most. Do start with Jellyfin as it's easy to install.

Plex has a few more features with plex pass.

However I switched to jellyfin a few years ago because I found everything to be too limiting and dependent on them. Including the necessity to pay for codecs / playback on some of their mobile apps.

Jellyfin is a lot less polished, but it works well and you're in control of everything.

I would recommend trying out jellyfin first. If you encounter some deal breaking issue or aren't happy with it, check our plex.

It depends what you use it for.

If you're watching your own content within your home then Jellyfin is better. It's free, open source and private. Your Jellyfin instance is yours and secure, and entirely under your control.

Plex's differences are mostly behind it's plex pass pay wall, and you sacrifice privacy using their platform. The key difference is really offline and remote viewing of content which is easier and slicker with plex (but doable with jellyfin), and the plex App maybe available a few more devices. There are also some credits and ad skipping features. That's about it - I struggle to see the benefit in plex. The only other thing I can think of is some people prefer the interface?

I used to use Plex and got annoyed when I couldn't view my content, which I host locally, because their login servers were down. Made me realise why did I need them so I researched a bit and switched to Jellyfin.

I like Jellyfin quite a bit better. The UI is less cluttered and the controls make more sense. It also doesn't phone home like plex. I do keep plex running beside it for my dad and sister. Plex has way better device support.

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

Plex is great if you want to pay for features and need a media server/streaming platform hybrid

Plex for sharing with others. Jellyfin for personal use only.

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.

I've used both for an extensive amount of time, and found Plex to be superior in basically every way. It's both nicer to use, and the library is a bit easier to manage. Not to mention all the back-end things you might want to use if you're heavy into video usage

I have both (they both can coexist peacefully on the same library). I use jellyfin for any watching on my phone or computer.

However, where jellyfin still really kind of falls apart is when casting to my Chromecast. Controls don't work, subtitles are unpredictable or missing, and it's just generally a mess.

So I use Plex for casting, and jellyfin for everything else. I bought a Plex lifetime pass ages ago, so it's an easy call to just have them both running.

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

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.

Kodi has fallen out of fashion these days but it's also an excellent solution, depending on your streaming needs. I've used Plex in the past and found it to be sluggish on Samsung's Tizen OS. Jellyfin was a lot slicker, but also a fair bit more work to set-up if you want to stream remotely.

In the end, I put one of my pi4s to work as a Kodi box, since I only stream to my TV. It's running LibreELEC, which is a barebones OS providing just enough to run Kodi. Media is fetched from a samba share on the home server. It's been far better for me than Plex ever was, and way easier to set-up than Jellyfin. Kodi is essentially a standalone player, so not the right solution if you're wanting to stream to multiple devices or remote clients. Just throwing another option out there for anyone looking.

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.

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 have both. I never touch Jellyfin. Plex is just better experience in every way. If Jellyfin was as good as plex I would use that because I agree more with the philosophy.

I really like the more open nature of jellyfin and they seem more ready to embrace new features than plex. For example, last I checked, AV1 encodings are not supported by plex but are by jellyfin.

The only reason I use plex anyway is because I have the problem, that subtitles go out of sync when using the jellyfin app which is pretty much unacceptable when watching anime with subtitles only