plex or Jellyfin?

HomelessCanadian@lemmy.world to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 127 points –

I’ve got Jellyfin up and running right now on a DS620Slim NAS and it’s running pretty good so far. I’ve seen a lot of people say they prefer Plex over Jellyfin. What are the main advantages to plex?

124

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.

You can get intro skipping for Jellyfin too with a plugin. It even works with Findroid, which is a native Android app for Jellyfin. I've been using it for a while now (maybe a month or so) and it's always worked perfectly.

Question about the viewing habits data. Is this only related to the Free Ad Supported Streaming content Plex pushes or are they also tracking viewing habits of users personal libraries?

There's no way of knowing, which is the whole problem with their model and why a lot of us self host things in the first place. Even if they super duper promise not to use the data, they could be lying. And if they are actually true to their word today, that could change tomorrow.

We know the data goes to Plex.

I would not bet you ANY amount of money they'd leave any stone unturned on data sales.

That's why none of the stuff I sign up with them is using any of my usual credentials, they do have my ip though.

Seems like I’ll continue to stick with Jellyfin because of the offline access. My internet is very spotty where I live so it seems to be the best option.

Same here.

My internet connection isn't too spotty, but having gone through it I found it really annoying not being able to watch my own shows off my own systems just because I can't auth to Plex's login servers.

Great list of comparison!

Worth noting that Jellyfin is not only free as in beer (if you selfhost), but also free as in Freedom i.e. open source.

?! I can watch stuff locally from my Plex server even if my internet is down.

You have to disable authentication for certain ip's / local networks. It's not easy or straight forward, but it works.

Last time I had an outage, I was still watching from my roku and in the browser.

https://www.howtogeek.com/303282/how-to-use-plex-media-server-without-internet-access/

Trick is, it's 4000% easier to set up when you're on the internet.

You can insert some xml in places if you're offline, but if you're offline, knowing the places is incredibly difficult.

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.

Something I don't see talked about enough with Jellyfin is that the UI is much nicer than Plex. It's so clean and uncluttered, where Plex is this bizarre mess of unclear controls and advertised content.

I couldn't disagree more and I think you're in the minority here.

Plex UI is just leagues ahead. Also last I checked the desktop app UI and Android TV ui is pretty bad also. Its just the Web UI in a wrapper.

I'm new to both, and both are terrible if you ask me, but for different reasons. Where I see plex having a clear UI advantage is where it comes with a native app for that platform, which is less often the case of jellyfin (although it's slowly catching up). Being open source, jellyfin has a clear advantage IMO because with enough traction, the community will be able to do wonderful things (think of winamp skins meets android custom ROM scene, or something to that effect).

And as a new comer having only seen the freemium side of plex, it has really weirded me out in some places (sponsored stuff, stuff of no use to me that I can't disable, locked out stuff, including petty stuff like HDR encoding...) , so much so that I don't see myself trusting them my credit card, and so I might never get to experience the "real thing". That's just how my perception of it is: Plex probably needs me to pay for it to become good, but it won't be that much better (and still have many quirks) to justify it.

To each their own and all that, but for my time, I agree with you Plex still has the edge in UI by a wide margin. The advertised content is super annoying but it is possible to trim it.

also, after implementing my pi-hole, I'm not crazy about the fact plex keeps trying to send out analytics.

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.

Plex just started requiring a login to my local server. I don't have a plex account, no reason to get one, I only stream locally. Sounds like Jellyfin is the way to go!

Your 4th point is the opposite for me, any kind of subtitles I have on causes transcoding in jellyfin. Its the only thing stopping me from switching fully.

Set "Burn Subtitles" to AUTO and grab the Open Subtitles plugin and make sure you are logged in. Beware opensubtitles.com and opensubtitles.org are different logins.

I'd say about 95% of what I'm playing is playing without transcoding to my LG CX Oled with Jellyfin app on it.

I don't know enough about the triggers for transcoding to know why I'm getting this result, but my server has an obscene GPU in it. I'm not sure if this is a factor.

Interesting that I find number 3 different for me. I have a very heterogeneous library and I find plex better at choosing when to transcode and what quality to transcode.

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.

This is pretty much it, Plex offers far more client apps that are full featured and they make it super easy to setup and use both as an admin and a user. Especially for things like OTA TV where they provide the guide data once it’s setup (which is why it’s a paid option). I’d move to JellyFin in a heartbeat if they’d support OTA and DVR playback on AppleTV.

.......they do but, you have to supply the schedule. I was using a Home run to pipe OTA tv in but, have since moved to a IPtv provider. Works very very well

The problem I have is there is no way to playback live tv on AppleTV which is what we use throughout our home. Plex just works and has wife approved first party apps for pretty much everything.

If Jellyfin had a good Xbox app I would switch immediately.

In theory it'd be possible to make a Jellyfin UWP app, of course nobody's made one yet. Maybe it could be you ;)

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).

I didn’t realize how expensive plex is. Definitely going to keep with Jellyfin for now.

Great choice! Am a happy Jelly user with a useless lifetime plexpass ;-)

I still only use the free version of plex. I don't stream to other people but I am pretty sure the option to share my library is still there. I do stream from two other libraries on occasion.

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.

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

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.

All the Jellyfin votes had me downloading it and before it even got downloaded you changed my mind lol. Just gonna stick with plex. I like simple and already have the lifetime sub.

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.

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.

Jellyfin is offline too. My internet died for a week and I couldn't log into Plex...

You want to access your home media, at home, without contacting Plex servers first? Blasphemy!

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.

Not sure how long ago you tested it, but there is now an alternative Android app called Findroid which I like much more than the official app.

I’ve found my media I play over the network looks grainy on some devices using Jellyfin. But it’s probably settings I have wrong

Been quite a while! Thanks for telling me though, I will test it out when I get to it!

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 already commented this on another comment here but there's a plugin for Jellyfin to get intro skipping

I had that plug-in installed and it never skipped a single intro for me

You need to install a modified web interface (just replace some files on your server) so you get the skip button

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.

Yeah I’m running docker for my Jellyfin and cloudflare container right now. I’ll try Plex to see how it works, but my internet might suck too much for the authentication servers

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.

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

And don’t care about privacy / believes that Plex will not be hacked one more time.

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

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'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

Plex user for over a decade and my only gripe is lack of accounts when internet goes out. When I'm self hosting, I kind of consider it a baseline for something like authentication to a local self hosted server to work without an internet connection.

Also the "recommended" bullshit. What the fuck. I know hat I'm hosting. I know what I download. Why does plex feel the need to force this as the default landing page? Honestly I with jellyfin was a bit more mature cause I'd use that instead.

I totally get that tbh. The app keeps giving me notifications for recommendations of shit from services I never even connected. I use this exclusively for my local media

Isn't there an option to disable authentication for local networks anymore?

@cyberpunk007 @dinckelman

Out of curiosity, what features are you missing from #jellyfin?

Doesn't feel as polished, the music tagging was much worse, and the UI overall was not as good, as much as I hate the"recommend" section of plex.

Also I think there was something else. At the time I was running plex in freebsd and fin was only on Linux.

@cyberpunk007

I agree with you.

It works better for me though, especially because I never paid for plex pass, so I don't have access to hardware accelerated transcoding on plex.

UI though, has never really been all that big of an issue for me. If I can navigate quickly, I am good.

I can say with certainty though that the plex roku app is way better than jellyfins.

I have to admit, I really love the skip into feature on Plex. The fact that it runs locally and just analyzes audio for it is super cool for me.

It's above my knowledge to do it myself, but I'd love to see that implemented in jellyfin eventually.

@pyrodorobo @cyberpunk007 It's there as a plugin, but isn't as reliable as what Plex does (for my library at least).

The Android TV client also doesn't support showing the button, so you have to always have it automatically skip. ☹️

Oooh I might have to play around with it some more then. I have it running alongside Plex but haven't used it in a bit

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.

The FOSS crowd will eventually pop in and try sway you strongly the other way

That's pretty clear from the comments/upvotes, but I don't think it's undeserved either. Jellyfin is the underdog that came to take the slack left by Plex growing discontent, does a decent job overall, and gets measurably better over time.

What's interesting to me is to think about what Plex could do that an active community around jellyfin couldn't, and the answer is not technical, but commercial, and along the lines of more partnership and integrations with hardware or streaming platforms, for which I (and most people here, apparently) have no use. YMMV of course.

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

Why? I share my jellyfin server with others too..

Plex is preinstalled on most smart tvs’s. And in ones with very limited app stores.

Also easy for others to make their own plex account, and you just give access to that user through the UI.

jellyfin requires more on the client side. Beyond what my mum can do on her own.

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 found what really helps Jellyfin on my Chromecast is setting the player manually. There's a setting to make it ask which player to use when starting a show and if one doesn't work, 99% of the time the other one works fine.

Sometimes switching players doesn't fix subtitles for me, in those situations I usually have to toggle subs a few times or restart the stream and they actually work.

In my opinion it's a minor enough inconvenience given Jellyfin is 100% free and open source, whereas Plex is tracking you and charging you. But of course maybe your media is in some more difficult format than mine.

Is the Plex pass really worth the 160$ CAD? Seems like a lot of money on one application

The $160 is a lifetime pass... I pay $20/mo for Netflix. That's $240/year. So, if you think it's worth it for even one year, compared to something like Netflix, then it's a pretty solid value proposition.

I bought the lifetime pass in 2014 when it was $75. Been more than happy with that decision.

Same. I don't recall the pricing but I signed up roughly around that time. I haven't regretted it.

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.

You can easily integrate the jellyfin to kodi, and have both - consistent library across multiple devices AND beautiful UI.

There are 2 addons for it.

One will allow you to browse your jellyfin media using the api, and to reencode on the fly, but it's annoyingly slow to browse the library this way.

The other one will integrate your jellyfin library to local kodi database. You just need to specify the path to your samba share in the jellyfin library. It'll fetch the metadata from jellyfin, but access the media using SMB directly. It's pretty fast, since kodi doesn't have to scrape the metadata itself, and it keeps itself up to date, no need for periodic library rescans.

To add to that, it is possible to use Kodi as a front-end for the plex server. This is what I do and it's great.

I like using plex server because for my use case it makes media management super easy and it works flawlessly, I just put all my media in movies/shows folder and it takes care of the rest automatically.

I have set up Kodi with PlexKodiConnect (props to the creator, it's fantastic) on a NUC clone plugged to my TV. Kodi is by far a much better player than the plex one, especially when playing 4K, so I get the best of both worlds.

On top of that it still leaves me the possibility to use the plex player on other devices if needed.

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.

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.

Do you know how PlexAmp compares to airsonic-advanced/navidrome/subsonic? That's definitely an area where jellyfin is weak but great alternatives are out there.

I haven't used those apps in a long time, so my experience is pretty dated. PlexAmp is very very good though.

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

Me personally, I like Jellyfin. Im not using it daily atm. But when i was, i used it purely for streaming music and it was great for that.

LTT did a video on both a while back and its kind of a toss up imo. Depends on what you care about. Id recommend that video.

https://youtu.be/jKF5GtBIxpM

Jellyfins Xbox app is unusable and afaik there's no app for Samsung tvs or at least not older ones.

Hmm how old is your Samsung TV? Jellyfin doesn't have an official app that you can find in their app store however you can side load it (it's called jellyfin tizen)

I'll be honest and it was far from an easy task to side load it and I don't actually remember how I got it installed in the end but it is doable and works great

Try both, but personally I had trouble with playback on my older android tablet with jellyfin and so I went with plex which works for me.

I tried setting up both for a local music server last year, and found Plex's cloud requirements and constant upselling were more of a pain than it was worth. Jellyfin was the one I kept.

I was left unimpressed by jellyfin's photo and video capabilities. Tags detection often was inconsistent/incomplete and metadata retrieval to fill the gaps made things worse in many instances. If you want something specialized for audio, that has great support client side, you should give airsonic-advanced/navidrome/subsonic a shot

Jellyfin if you do not like being spied on by your self hosted media library. Plex if you do like being spied on by your self hosted media library.

Also - Plex if you want Audiobooks, because the app Prologue is 🔥

Jellyfins OTA and DVR are a dumpster fire. So if you want to watch and record OTA TV go with Plex.

I thought they disabled plugins including for IPTV?

If they did good, because they didn't work on any of the three or so versions I tried.

I only gave a half assed attempt. I just use VLC for IPTV and have to accept it won't downscale the bitrate over a mobile connection sadly.

If you're satisfied with Jellyfin, you should stick to that cause Plex ain't bringing much to the table in all honesty. I still use Plex cause it works better most of the time really.

one main question should also be, do you want to selfhost or not.

because plex is not selfhosted imo due to their login servers.

I mean it is self-hosted.... Everything but the Authentication component. That doesn't make it not self-hosted

The antenna and music support is better on Plex imo, but I think both require to pay for premium

A good middle ground is emby. I've been using it for a couple years now and it's been solid.

I was a happy Emby camper a couple of years ago. But Emby started to add features behind paywall . Jellyfin is a fork of Emby so it was easy for me to switch.

Server wise they are practically identical, but the AndroidTV app of jellyfin lags behind quite a bit, the media player is bad, it doesn't handle well changing subtitles, moving the clip forward and backward... Some of these are fixed by using an external video player, but weirdly enough there have been some movie formats that jellyfin couldn't handle (the TV app) and emby did.

I just wish that the TV app were identical to the android app with remote functionality, but I'm no android dev so I'll stay put and wait.

I'm fine with that personally, it takes a lot of hours to develop features. They have to make money somehow if they want to make it more than just a side project. Jellyfin last I played (1-2 years ago) with wasn't where Emby much less Plex is. Missing a lot of features I grew dependant on. Been itching to try it again since Jellyfin January on the Self Hosted podcast tho.

Same for me.
-It works well
-my dad (who has dementia) can use it
-It runs even when the net goes down (means my dad is happy)
-Can Transcode for our TV's with premiere (would rather not have to pay for that)

Have been thinking about Jellyfin...as I like the FOSS angle...and seems like it is gaining a lot of traction in the selfhost community. I host Emby Server on my Unraid server and our nVidia Shields play content great using the Emby app. Going to be investigating Jellyfin when I start to move the rest of my serivces off of Unraid.