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?
If you’re happy with Jellyfin I don’t see a reason to switch. But if you’re missing something, do checkout Plex.
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.
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
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
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.
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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!
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.
My streamers just needed to buy a Google Chromecast with android TV.
Just a barrier many won’t cross.
No media then :)
Jellyfin is better. Plex has features behind paywall
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.
A good middle ground is emby. I’ve been using it for a couple years now and it’s been solid.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
What’s the name of that plugin?
You know, its not that hard to just try and google “intro skipper jellyfin” since its actually the name of it, but here you go https://github.com/ConfusedPolarBear/intro-skipper
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.
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.
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 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.
