this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
314 points (97.6% liked)
Selfhosted
59999 readers
461 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam.
-
Posts here are to be centered around self-hosting. Please ensure it is clear in your post how it relates to self-hosting.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or git here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title.
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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.
I would recommend Symfonium for muaic listening.
It has an insane feature set (and it can support both Plex and Jellyfin libraries
One of my killer features of it are rolling cache. And you can decide how big and how it behaves to cache songs
I use Jellyfin to listen music at best on desktop at work through the browser
Can you explain rolling cache? I'm pretty sure plexamp does this, but maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're referring to.
My phone UI is german so I translated it with google. Text should be accurate enough

It's essentially like Spotify does it (probably)
Should something be unclear, give me a heads up :)
Gotcha... Yes, Plexamp does this as well:
Probably inspired by it.
It's a neat feature :)
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.
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.
It's a small piece in your observation but I've been on the hunt for an android client for jellyfin with downloads that are.. usable. Fladder has been so far the only one where this seemed to work okay-ish (it's still slow, and I noticed it doesn't detect if the device supports Dolby vision to force transcoding). But still, if your one user is still trying.. maybe it helps them a lil.
I'll take a look at it and let them know. At the moment they're back on Plex, but if this app works the way they want, they may be open to switching. Thanks!
I can't tell if that's a complement or a dig 🤣
I meant it as a compliment. Lol. Both of the Roku apps are fairly functional as far as I've been able to observe.