Honest question, because I know multiple people who are not looking to jump ship since they already have the Plex Pass.
I bought a Plex lifetime pass in 2014 when it was $75. I’ll keep using it until they make it stop working.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Same on your rankings and I also run all three.
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).
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.
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.
Just passing by from all, not much of a self-hoster myself, but I do have Plex running in my home. I just never really do much with it these days…it runs, I log into it and access my media. I’m not sharing with other people. I’m not using the other streaming services it tried to show me, etc. It works for now and I’m not invested enough to put in the work to switch to something else.
I will say/ask this though, I have a ton of music (video is secondary for me). I use plexamp on my phone all the time as my primary source of music. Does jellyfin do well with music + mobile pretty well out of the box?
I don’t have PlexPass btw
I have a jellyfin server and use manet on iOS and it works perfectly well for me.
I got Plex working on my network and found that it didn’t have a nice UI, it didn’t match shows to their IMDb titles consistently, it showed duplicates, and I wasn’t able to access things remotely as easily as Plex.
I have both technically running. The metadata matching on jellyfin is complete ass, so I have to manually match up like a third of my library, or reconfigure the files (absolutely not happening) which I just dgaf enough to do when vanishingly few people would be able to use it, so its only partially set up. It also can’t be accessed by anyone because I’m not dumb enough, nor smart enough, to open it up to the internet (I don’t know how to do it safely and I’m thus entirely not interested in trying).
Plex, by contrast, is already configured (and if I have to scrap the library and start over, as I’ve done several times, its pretty easy to reconfigure), the metadata linking is correct and automatic most of the time, everyone already has access to it, and it just works for them, and thus for me. I’m not giving it up just because a bunch of hyper-nerds on the internet say it’s bad for, frankly, nonsense reasons that don’t apply or matter to me or honestly most people who use it. I’ll wait until it -actually- is bad for my use, or until jellyfin serves the use I have for it, which it absolutely does not do presently, and may never. (And no, a vpn or whatever setup is not a solution, it’s just one more thing to maintain and fuck with constantly to keep it working for people who don’t even know what a vpn is. Hard pass.)
I wouldn’t pay for plex now, nor in the last several years, and I strongly discourage my users from doing so, but spent money is spent, so might as well keep using what I paid for until it doesn’t work for me anymore. I mean really, why not? I genuinely haven’t seen any valid reasons to get rid of it, and lots of reasons to keep it.
The metadata matching on jellyfin is complete ass, so I have to manually match up like a third of my library
Does Plex somehow do a better job of figuring out special features metadata? Because other than that, you follow the naming schemes, and Jellyfin has had a 100% hit rate for me.
I’m not really sure what you mean by special feature in this context, but plex pulls the meta largely without needing to rename files (some exceptions, but they are very obvious, like if there’s words/numbers before the title for some reason, like when I ripped my 13 hours of classic monster movies and they were numbered), and it usually doesn’t care about extra stuff like encoding info and whatnot. Hardly need to manually match anything when it gets added, and never need to manually match shows. Handfull of stuff if I rebuild the server from scratch, but those files mostly don’t have metadata to begin with (some youtube rips, some documentaries that probably came out of a series, that sort of thing). It just seems to be a lot more forgiving, I guess.
I’m just not super interested at the moment in going through my entire library, which would take half of forever, to rename everything to make it work properly. Especially when I already did/do that for plex’s requirements, and it works fine. I assumed when I set jellyfin up it would pull the same, but it doesn’t, in my experience.
I can’t make my family members use Wireguard, they are stubborn, what can I say?
Secondly it’s the guides I saw for some specifics things I wanted, almost everything was with Plex in mind.
Thirdly I just liked how quick it was to set up and intuitive to use compared to Jellyfin.
Fourthly the Users are really easy to manage and create from Plex without me having to manage everyone.
Finally many smart TVs come with a specific subset of apps and Plex usually makes the cut while Jellyfin does not, again, family members, I can’t control what TVs they buy.
I don’t even know how to setup wireguard because I don’t have the time to tinker and learn.
