Selfhosted

Ease of use for my users across multiple platforms with minimal tech knowledge on their end. I'm sharing my library with ranges from 12yo to 70. I need it to "just work" and it does that perfectly.

Lifetime subscriber when it was like $75 bux

Setup and runs on my NAS (unRAID) Uses a small GPU to transcode as needed Shared only with non technical family members

Has worked as is for YEARS.

So, the question is, am I looking for something to replace a working free (prepaid) solution I have? That answer is nope.

WhatI've noticed is that people who prioritize privacy and just want to watch their downloads on their tv usually use jellyfin and people who prioritize ux slickness and want to run an IPTV service for their friends and family usually use plex.

I tried Jellyfin once about a year ago and it was... OK I guess? Certainly nowhere near as polished as the rabid fan base would have me believe, and there was something in my library that it flat out refused to play.

If I didn't already have a lifetime Plex Pass, and it was just me hosting my own media for a user count of one, then sure, I'd use it. But none of those things are true. I need something that "just works" and Plex fits that bill.

Like most people here, I bought a lifetime pass when it was $75 and it's paid for itself over and over again in the time since. I honestly think I've had more than $750 worth of value from my purchase. Sure they've made some odd decisions recently, but until they start actively taking away functionality or rescind existing lifetime subs then I will continue to use it.

Meanwhile, not to belittle you personally, but the fact that every thread that mentions Plex in any way, good or bad, is guaranteed to be dominated by people circle-jerking over their beloved Jellyfin has put me completely off the project, to the point that I've had to add the word to my blocklist. Obviously that's not working too well or I wouldn't have seen this post!

The client apps on Apple TV are just not good. I have tried swiftfin which is slow and I find it not very visually appealing. There there is infuse which does look better, but is missing features and requires a subscription for full functionality. If there is a app I'm missing I would be happy to try it.

I keep Jellyfin up to date and check in or it from time to time. Even have watchstate so my watched history stays updated. Hoping one day there will be a good Apple TV app and I could fully switch.

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.

Problem is access outside your home for family and friends.

There are serious security gaps that make it a non starter to expose to the internet.

I've been using Jellyfin ever since they forked out of Emby, and honestly, it's the biggest complaint that I have. It is incredibly difficult to make it available to friends and family who are on various devices, networks, so on and so forth.

Whereas Plex "just works."

I’m not switching at this time because I already bought a lifetime pass about 7 years ago. If ANY of my functionality gets changed by Plex then I’ll be switching

I absolutely love jellyfin and frequently take advantage of its features. But the client absolutely suck butt. When I can hardly get my mom to remember which app on her TV lets her watch what, I can't also have her fucking around with play buttons that don't do what they say, a "continue watching" list that's often haunted by episodes that have been marked as watched, or inscrutable menu icons mashed into the top-right corner of a media browser.

And don't get me started on getting people logged in on the client.

Agree with most of the other comments here, but number one for me is PlexAmp.

This is all a fascinating thread because everyone says Plex "just works"

I started using jellyfin about 6 months ago. I don't really know anything about plex use. However, jellyfin worked out of the box for me. Set up with a docker container and have never had any problems with it.

Its never failed to load media, or loaded duplicates or any of the other random things others have mentioned here.

For the most part it feels like people in the thread have just used Plex for a long time and had their first impression of jellyfin years ago and probably haven't checked it out since.

Which, fair play to them, life gets busy and setting up and migrating a media library is something that takes at least a couple hours which could be spent doing anything else.

If people are new, I'm sure they won't even bother with Plex and their ridiculously high fees. I cannot see Plex maintaining their userbase at this rate.

With them unable to maintain their userbase, I give it a year before they cancel lifetime passes and 2 years or so before it's completely enshitified and unusable.

I like Plex.

When I bought my Plex lifetime pass I saw it as an investment. So far, it's paid off handsomely.

I'm still getting great experiences, able to access it from anywhere in the world, on basically any device, seamlessly and simply.

I get it that the jellyfin community is really excited about their thing - I just am not.

I've run jellyfin, it was kind of cool I guess, but there was nothing compelling about it. So I uninstalled it. What is jellyfin's "must have" feature, anyway?

I wouldn't go out and build a new car when I'm perfectly happy with my 10-year old sedan. If you're expecting me to go through that just because the new ones cost more than I spent years ago, you're insane. I wouldn't go and re paint my house just because the old company now charges new customers more for their paint.

I paid for it, it works well. There's no reason (except all the FUD I keep seeing on lemmy,) to even think about dismantling and recreating it with something new.

Keep building your dream tool Jellyfin people - Godspeed, but your community should target acquiring net-new users instead of trying to scare and poach happy users away from what they already have.

I got started with jellyfin and never used Plex but there's a bunch of rough edges:

• No apps on several smart tv/streaming stick stores, Vizio has an app for plex but not jellyfin so I would need to buy a new streaming device. Yes smart tvs spy on you but the alternatives people recommend either spy on you just as much or are expensive (Nvidia shield) and most of them still require side loading so it's a major obstacle for sharing with anyone else.
• Casting from the mobile app won't play at full resolution, you can get around this by using VLC as your player and casting from that but that causes it to frequently lose watch progress. Also stopping casting or playing the next episode doesn't work properly with VLC and you need to rapidly mash "back" to get into the jellyfin app again and queue up a new episode.
• The current release of Jellyfin desktop won't play audio for iptv streams, this is fixed in the dev branch but I have yet to find a build without other critical bugs so I'll likely need to wait for the next release which currently has no target date.
• The browser version has spotty controller support that stops working constantly. When it does work it lacks any way to access context menus to mark shows as watched etc. If you're using a flatpak browser to run it on steam deck or whatever, you'll have codec and passthrough issues (Chrome is the only flatpak with decent codec support).
• Others have mentioned the security issues which you can bypass by putting authentik or something in front of it but then you can only share with people using browser.

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 tried Jellyfin probably 2 years ago and it was fine but Plex is just "plug n play" in regard to my family setting it up themselves with little help from me.

Plexamp is the only way I stream music too so that's a big reason why I won't move yet.

Lifetime pass, it still works well so why would I switch?

Have lifetime already. No reason to jump. Generally it just works.

No need to have another project while Plex still works fine.

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 run both, I got the lifetime license for under $100 and it is much easier to have my various family members install the Plex app and then login than to get them on my VPN to access Jellyfin.

Grandma ain't installing Tailscale

Jellyfin is great and I run both. However, sharing access with family is a PITA compared to Plex. I paid for Plex Pass lifetime at the $75 and have no reason to fully move. Keeping Jellyfin around in case Plex tries to rug pull lifetime passes, though.

I'm not using Plex, but I feel like I can answer my complaints about using jellyfin.

My biggest complaint is the lack of clients. It is such a pain in the butt to install jellyFin on all of my products.

My second complaint is the security design. They've had open issues about unauthenticated endpoints for three or four years now. And whenever the issue gets so old that it starts to look bad, they refactor the issue into a newer issue abd bury it in the sand.

For a while this was done under the guise of maintaining legacy client support, but just recently it looks like they're starting to focus on more security, and I've noticed some of those security holes are being closed finally, but it's a major concern for me that they've been open for as long as they have.

I use Plex to save money on plumbers because I cannot solder. Plex gives me the ability to exact repairs myself.

I paid for it ages ago on a deal, and it currently suits my needs. It runs as a docker container and it just works. It’s easy enough for my elderly mom to use remotely and I’ve ripped my entire movie collection for her to watch. I also like the live tv that’s included with the pass.

I would switch in a heartbeat if it wasn’t doing what I need, but so far I have no complaints, it works well for my family’s needs.

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.

I got a lifetime pass for cheap ages ago and while the company isn't doing so well, Plex itself isn't getting any worse. Its just not getting better.

As long as that continues, then I'm fine with staying. I only really use it for Plexamp anyway.

I see so many here with the argument of 'I already have a life time pass, so this increase doesn't affect me". And in all honesty, that's a mostly logical take on this if you already have it.

However, the signs are clear. This is a first step. I don't believe (and I'm very aware I could be wrong) for a second that the executives are actually expecting people to grab a pass for 750 dollars, but they expect a minimum amount of people to go ahead and do it anyway. Once they see this conversation is dying down, and that no money is coming in on that end, they will switch to another method of getting money (the investors need their money, right?).

From there, the sky's the limit. Charge extra if your instance has more than 3 users, or charge the users that are not you. Cap your quality at 720p unless you fork over 2 dollars per month. Pay for this new AI feature that is not included in your pass. Pay to disable this AI feature that was forced into your pass.

For pass holders there is no problem with this increase, it's what invariably happens when companies start moving towards the money grab path.

We'll just watch from the sidelines and will be here to help you migrate once (not if) these things happen.

Like most people here I bought a lifetime pass years ago and Plex just works (it passes the Wife Acceptance Test).

However, I am planning on spinning up Jellyfin and giving it a go and seeing what it's like. I'm a bit nervous reading and things like multiple versions of the same movie displaying separately but I also think I saw a plugin that fixes that.

Plex has clients for every single device there is. I arrive to some 2018 smart tv in a holiday cottage and the absolutely dreadful, measly App Store, now long abandoned, has a plex client.

Also I have a very old life time pass so current pricing means nothing to me.

I already paid when it was cheap. I'll stay and get my full dollars worth and then some. I paid for it, I'll use it. When it is unusable I'll bail. Anything else is stupid.

The Apple TV client is basically unusable. Otherwise I would have switched already.

I bought a Plex lifetime pass in 2014 when it was $75. I’ll keep using it until they make it stop working.

I’m afraid of exposing HTTPS to the open internet.

Life time subscriber since a very long time. So no need, but I would have switched if there was a decent Xbox or LG TV app.

Plex works for me, Jellyfin doesn’t because of missing apps 🤷‍♂️