Honest question, because I know multiple people who are not looking to jump ship since they already have the Plex Pass.
When i have a plex lifetime pass from 2016, dam 10 years. Plex works fine, my biggest complaint is the other steaming service they are trying to sell, offline viewing on mobile needs a lot of love.
Everything else works good enough. Why should i spend time on converting?
It is like Microsoft windows, enshittification.
Plex has clients for every single device there is. I arrive to some 2018 smart tv in a holiday cottage and it’s absolutely dreadful, measly App Store on a since abandoned TV OS has a plex client.
Also have a very old life time pass so current pricing means nothing to me.
As a Jellyfin user that has lurked in past “Plex did bad thing X” threads and someone suggested jellyfin.
The usual reasons are
- Remote login (through their relay)
- Which also plays into remote streaming
- Plex Amp (their music player) is supposedly the absolute best of anything
- Very easy to sign up (both the admin and family and friends
At least that’s what I remember at the top of my hat.
I used to be on plex for similar reasons.
Remote login is still a hassle of course. I work around it with a VPN but that causes issues sometimes.
Plex Amp went great for a while for me until it suddenly didn’t. The app got incredibly laggy on my phone when I was playing playlists of a 1000 songs or more. I switched to navidrome + Symfonium as an alternative and set up remote access with a cloudflare tunnel.
I thought about replying to some comments but decided to make a top level comment instead. There are some valid points a few people have brought up that aren’t the easiest things to fix. Some are, actually pretty easy to fix. Some are issues where Jellyfin forces you to do things a certain way, like file naming convention, which I think is extremely smart to do anyway.
But the one reply I keep seeing is “until Plex stops working, I see no reason to switch”. With that, I mean, I guess we all agree you are going to get fucked by Plex at some point. They’ve been slowly cranking up the heat in the pot. I love my media library and I just couldn’t stand waiting for the rolling boil. I’ve been using Adobe products since 1999. I recognize an abusive relationship when I see it. If you’re happy where you’re at, I mean, by all means. I’m not going to yuck your yum. Many of the issues are exactly the kinds of things the Jellyfin community is happy to help fix with you. I do wish you all the best, but I’ve never gotten locked into a great deal that didn’t hurt when I needed to get out of it before.
99% of my usage is on an Apple TV and the Jellyfin Apple TV client is just really bad. Last time I tried it didn’t even display “watched” markers and the UI looked terrible. None of the third party clients seemed decent either. The Plex client is much better (although I could do without the “suggested” sections).
The tvOS app is actively under active development, although it’s been a couple years since they’ve published a proper release. Devs routinely post updates here
Lifetime pass purchased years ago and Plex manages sign-ins and connections for my less computer-savvy friends.
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 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.
See no further as wenn Windows does something bad and Linux users come in like locusts.
Yeah, pretty much this. I have very little reason to switch, as the price increase doesn’t affect me at all.
Plus, there are enough known Jellyfin exploits that I’m not comfortable having it on the internet. The vulnerabilities are exploitable even with a reverse proxy. And I enjoy being able to share my libraries with friends and family. I have a few friends who run Plex servers of their own, and having their shared libraries show up in a single unified home page is nice. That wouldn’t be possible if I had to get all of them set up with a local VPN connection first.
Luckily, the two happily run side-by-side. So there’s literally no good reason to ditch Plex if you already have the lifetime pass.
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.
I would recommend Symfonium for muaic listening.
It has an insane feature set (and it can support both Plex and Jellyfin librariesOne 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
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.
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.
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 actually distrust the plex approach to granting remote access. WireGuard or Yggdrasil into a jellyfin instance seems more practical and manageable for me, and for my friends it’s fine, but I will concede it’s not great for people trying to commercialize their pirated content. That added step of connecting with VPN is super not great.
For my friends and family, it’d be fairly annoying to connect to Tailscale, and really annoying to connect to Wireguard or Yggdrasil.
Think of a smart TV used by your mom and having to guide her to install Wireguard on it lol.
I don’t fundamentally distrust Plex’s encryption after having tcpdumped it and seeing nothing but gibberish - which is exactly what my ISPs would see, that’s my reason for encryption. But I do not trust them to keep that feature operational indefinitely.
I’ve actually seen more people commercialise Jellyfin because you can edit the fuck out of its source code and add 10 ads and 3 paywalls. I’ve only seen people selling access to Plex shares directly - like you would sell a Steam key, whereas Jellyfin custom shares get customised and sold as a Netflix alternative with an active subscription in some places around the world.
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
I bought a Plex lifetime pass in 2014 when it was $75. I’ll keep using it until they make it stop working.
I bought the plex pass at the same price. I’ve been using jellyfin for just over a year now. Had to set up tailscale for remote access, but it’s worth it to use an open source tool.
I have both and run them side by side through Docker in UNRaid, but Jellyfin hardly ever gets used unless there is a problem with Plex and I don’t feel like fixing it immediately. I’ve had the Plex lifetime pass for forever.
I have young kids and really like Plex’s system for moderating content for their accounts. I’ve never explored this on Jellyfin though. As a person with crappy laptop speakers, subtitles are important to me. Plex does subtitles better than Jellyfin in my experience.
From my admin panel (showing the user child protection):
Idk where the age metadata for movies ia pulled from but I guess it’s either TMDB/TVDB or some other metadata source I added.
Seems to work though (I have not added it)
The age rating can be written over and locked so a refresh can not reset it.
As for subtitles (don’t quote me though):
SRT on the AndroidTV app is basically instant (just direct play)
PGS can (afaik) usually also played directly
VobSub needs to be burned in/transcoded ASS/SSA is in a phase to be implemented so it doesnt result in transcoding.But usually encoders/remuxers include SRT or PGS subs anyway.
My only complaint is the native iPad-app which needs a minute to stream SRT subs for whatever reason (using the web-ui). The mobile Android app, the AndroidTV and regular web ui basically work instantly so idk /shrugFor the price of people’s, you could just get better speakers.
Hell you can probably get a framework for what plex will cost next year.
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?
Yeah for sure. Super easy. Merely be born in 1959
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.
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.
Well now I can sell my account for 500
