Honest question, because I know multiple people who are not looking to jump ship since they already have the Plex Pass.
I already own a lifetime Plex pass, so I have no reason to stop using it. They are high thinking that anyone will pay $750 for lifetime. I paid under $100 but frankly I would have paid more, I use it every day. I’m glad that the devs there were able to get paid and provide for their families while making Plex. Plex works incredibly well for me and my family, I will use it for as long as I am able to.
I struggle to understand why JF users seem to want Plex users to convert so badly. I used JF for a while but things are great on Plex. If I thought JF was better I would switch and my metadata is well prepared for the day I need to.
I have both and run them side by side through Docker in UNRaid, but Jellyfin hardly ever gets used unless there is a problem with Plex and I don’t feel like fixing it immediately. I’ve had the Plex lifetime pass for forever.
I have young kids and really like Plex’s system for moderating content for their accounts. I’ve never explored this on Jellyfin though. As a person with crappy laptop speakers, subtitles are important to me. Plex does subtitles better than Jellyfin in my experience.
For the price of people’s, you could just get better speakers.
Hell you can probably get a framework for what plex will cost next year.
Well now I can sell my account for 500
Lifetime Pass holder here. Used to run Jellyfin alongside Plex. Had crashing issues and had to shut Jellyfin down for quite a bit. Came back after a while and started Jellyfin from scratch. None of my users ever chose Jellyfin over Plex.
- The UI is slower (at least on Windows), clunkier, and uglier. Hopefully this gets fixed in the upcoming big update they have planned for the desktop client. Their Roku app is actually on par with Plex’s though.
- The admin dashboard is confusing and in my opinion awful.
- Downloaded content is not viewable within the app on Android. This is the complaint I’ve heard the most from my user who made a significant effort to switch. Ironically, after the New Experience update this became less of an issue since Plex ruined downloads.
- Plexamp’s UI, radios, and sonic similarity feature were, last I checked, unmatched by a long-shot. I use my music library heavily. If I make the switch fully away from Plex, I’ll probably opt for something more specialized like Navidrome.
- Manually setting the edition of a movie is so much easier on Plex, and for someone who likes to have multiple editions, it’s less confusing for the user to see each edition individually labelled in the library than selecting the movie and being expected to know which file name they should pick. Not every file is named to Jellyfin’s standards because that would make them harder to add to my torrent client, and some don’t have their editions in the file name at all and I just have them hand-labelled in Plex based on run time.
- I’m still trying to setup my DVR in Jellyfin and can’t get it to work. Plex works fine, Jellyfin just won’t. It’s a moot point at the moment, but once I do get it to work, unless things have changed over the years, the channel guide is a whole other set of challenges.
I’m willing to deal with this personally simply because Plex creates just as much, if not more of a headache for me as an administrator and the bloat is ridiculous, but not a single one of my users has switched, and I don’t blame them. They don’t have to deal with the administrative difficulties, so there’s no benefit to them except being able to download files to their system instead of just in the app, which none of them care about. If nobody is going to use it, my focus ends up being on Plex anyway. I have been pushing Jellyfin for a year and a half. None of my friends or family want to use it unless Plex borks something, and even then they want Plex back.
Jellyfin just isn’t on par with Plex, no matter how much I wish it was. It’s death by a thousand cuts on both the user and administrative ends. It would be one thing if I were a free user or actively paying for Plex, but as a Lifetime Pass holder, I just can’t justify it yet.
Nothing in the self hosted space is taken seriously on windows. There’s a reason for that. Jellyfin on Linux is fine. I’m a fucking smooth brain and if I can do it, a crack enhanced autistic monkey can do it.
Plexamp is better. I will give you that. There’s nothing outright bad about jellyfins take on music. Apps like Discrete make it quite nice, but plexamp just satisfies that out-of-box itch.
For music enthusiasts plexamp is also basically unbeatable. I welcome the day open source catches up.
As an observer in these comments, this is a great answer. Thanks for typing it out.
It does seem like some “cuts” could be ironed out reasonably quickly, like the file naming issue or UI lag.
I bought a Plex lifetime pass in 2014 when it was $75. I’ll keep using it until they make it stop working.
I bought the plex pass at the same price. I’ve been using jellyfin for just over a year now. Had to set up tailscale for remote access, but it’s worth it to use an open source tool.
TL; DR: UX, UI, and memory.
Memory usage is a significant concern. It immediately made my NAS completely crash when attempting to scan the (not even very large) library. Plex, right now, as of writing, when idle, uses 30MB, compared to the 3.1GB reported by Jellyfin when I last tried it, which was the last reading before my NAS died a tragic death of RAM starvation.
The apps are bad. A browser isn’t a good solution - see HDR, 10bit, 5.1, Atmos, and bit-perfect support. Remote access is complex, particularly for those behind CG-NAT, and encryption for remote access is even more convoluted; Plex does it in one checkbox. Some of that is architectural, some financial, but the end result is a worse experience for me.
The UI design is such that any server slowdown affects responsiveness severely, even for simple actions, which unfortunately speaks volumes about how much of a priority the actual user experience is - that’s not something I’m compatible with as a person in general.
Third-party apps are not good either for my platforms, I deemed them to be unusable unstable and amusingly poorly designed - that’s including the Swift and Flutter versions, the latter of which’s design and UX I found incredibly obtuse. Stretching a phone app for desktop use feels a bit like stretching your ballsack into a wind sail - maybe just get a sail mate.
I genuinely wanted to like Jellyfin, I hate proprietary software, let alone paid software, LET ALONE paid piracy software. But JF still has so many areas like these that are just incredibly frustrating to deal with. Plex’s dogshit decisions are not impacting me much (Lifetime), I have established custom setups around the desktop Plex clients to make them usable, so I see no immediate reason to switch until Jellyfin addresses its memory usage and considers using a non-skid language for an application that’s essentially a file server, set of ffmpeg scripts and a metadata database.
I actually distrust the plex approach to granting remote access. WireGuard or Yggdrasil into a jellyfin instance seems more practical and manageable for me, and for my friends it’s fine, but I will concede it’s not great for people trying to commercialize their pirated content. That added step of connecting with VPN is super not great.
Thank you for providing a possible answer for why my Jellyfin server is such a memory hog. It eats up memory and CPU even while idling and grinds all of my other services to a crawl if I let it
4 people host libraries that my tech illiterate boomer parents access.
One login, many servers, singular interface.
That is very specifically the situation I’m in. Jellyfish, emby, you wanna whip up a persona… that’s a pretty damn clear-cut one for ya
Impressive! Is it possible to learn this power?
Yeah for sure. Super easy. Merely be born in 1959
No because you can’t easily and securely share your library and remote play.
I have a lifetime pass so there’s no need to switch to a worse product.
Plex doesn’t charge to just stream locally so I haven’t bothered switching or looking into switching yet.
Jellyfin doesn’t really do anything better than Plex. If someone already does have a Plex pass, then the best you can say about Jellyfin is that you’re glad things are missing (Like Discover/Plex Channels/etc). Also, the level of support for Jellyfin just isn’t there. Plex doesn’t always have great support, but answers to technical problems in Jellyfin are frequently just “Don’t do that”. As others have mentioned too, the experience of sharing your library with isn’t really even comparable. Your chances of sharing your Jellyfin library with your grandma are near zero unless you just do it for her.
The process of setting up Jellyfin as a backup solution actually led me to experimenting with Emby. Unless something crazy happens to my current Plex implementation I’m still not going to proactively switch, but Emby legitimately does (rarely) have some features where it has a leg up on both of them.
My chances of sharing a Plex library with grandma are also zero. I would still have to set it up for her. That’s a non argument.
no I have not tried it.
the jellyfin community is toxic af from my personal interactions. they’re always far more concerned with trying to one-up Plex users or just attempting to be always “right”.
not every member is this way, but the loudest among the community certainly makes me think the opposite.
I don’t plan on using jellyfin until it’s my last option.
I used to use Plex and now use jellyfin, not so much because one has features the other doesn’t, but because XBMC became what they said they never would be. That’s going back a ways, but I just saw the writing on the wall a few years ago that Plex had stopped caring about free users, and I was an admittedly free user.
People focus on monetary cost, but there is a price to Jellyfin, which is that you’re on your own with all the plumbing. I’m OK with that, but I can see why someone wouldn’t want to faf about with it.
Jellyfin will one day become what Plex is now, that’s the cycle of things.
Some of the users definitely like to pontificate a bit much and there’s still gaps in reliable clients for some platforms (e.g. Apple TV). That said, Jellyfin, as a service, is solid.
This is why I’ve used Emby for the longest time.
Interesting. I’ve had nothing but positive interactions, but I visit them on Discord.
I actively avoid discord.
Tried Jellyfin. It puked when it saw my library.
I bought plex lifetime years ago when it was like 125.
I still hate the new plex app ui on roku. It’s clunky and sucks. The alternative is to break my library in sections and hope something else will maybe work.
Sucks to add users to, users can’t reset their own password, and apparently security is so bad that exposing it to the internet is basically just giving hackers the front door key.
Jellyfin people who constantly ask “have you tried Jellyfin?” have never used Plex and don’t know what they are missing out on.
I have Emby lifetime. I have Plex lifetime. I try Jellyfin every year.
Plex wins always. Emby is second. Would not recommend Jellyfin.
I’m curious why Plex wins. In my experience, Plex offers no customization and very few options for changing the UI. My impression is it’s very hard to use if your media includes more than movies or TV.
What am I missing out on? I don’t mean this in a mean way, I think you are correct that I don’t know and am legitimately curious.
Plex has a broader range of supported devices, a slightly better user interface, and provides a path to sharing your library using logins for friends and family, with https so the traffic is encrypted. You can share your movie collection with Grandma without her getting FBI piracy warnings from her ISP.
I don’t use it because it costs money and it is a very simple vector to get in a lot of legal trouble, should any US government agencies put enough pressure on them to gain access to user data, because your streams pass through Plex’s servers to make the connection.
So far though, it has been safe and reliable for the majority of its users.
If the other two cost money, and I’m happy on Jellyfin, maybe ignorance is bliss.
Yeah, I’d like to know too (but won’t be using proprietary stuff just to find out).
Same on your rankings and I also run all three.
I already tried to setup jellyfin for a couple days before I bought the $120 Plex pass. I could not get it to work at all and it was frustrating reading all the vulnerabilities with the internet.
Plex took me 5 minutes to setup and all my friends can access my media no problem.
For ease of use, Plex wins Everytime.
setup
set up. “Setup” is a noun that lost its hyphen.
everytime
every time. Otherwise it’s not a word at all.
Do you understand how language evolves? It’s ok to be “wrong” as long as you’ve communicated successfully.
