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Why would anyone use Plex over jellyfin anyway? The writing was on the wall years ago.
this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2025
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I set up Plex on my mum's TV and she can just push play. The UI is intuitive (read: familiar) to her.
Jellyfin has a reputation for giving users more control and customizability, but the other side of that coin is that it's more "fiddly".
My users don't want to fiddle.
That's the opposite of my experience. Jellyfin just works and immediately exposes the content we're looking for, plex tries overloading you with bullshit and burying your actual content
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I set up Jellyfin on my mother-in-law's TV, it's just push play.
My mum has an Apple TV (the device, not the subscription) and on there she uses swiftfin. The only issue has been sound not working on certain audio tracks on certain movies, but in general it is easy for anyone.
Both are very familiar interfaces for anyone used to playing something from a streaming service.
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This is legit the opposite of my experience. I am a relatively tech savvy user, I like to fiddle with all the settings and an ugly UI doesn't inherently deter me as long as the experience is good, so when I first installed jellyfin I was ready to have a clunky experience fighting the UI.
Despite that, I was legitimately surprised at how Jellyfin was far less confusing for me to use out of the box than plex ever was. I found Plex's UI very confusing to navigate on my TV and my family did not like using it either. I remember especially hating all the extra categories and freemium content plex added that I wasn't interested in viewing but couldn't remove (or at least did not find a way to remove). In Jellyfin all of my content is just there and very easily categorized and there's no superfluous elements in the UI, just my stuff that I want to watch.
I remember plex also gave me more trouble during installation than jellyfin did. I actually found jellyfin very pleasant and intuitive to setup. Plex sent me down a Google rabbit hole to diagnose why it wouldn't boot at all.
It was genuinely such an awful experience as a first-time user that it made me wonder why anyone would use plex.
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Because I don't have to learn about things like proxies to try and open the service up outside my network in a secure manner or try to explain to family they need to run tailscale at the same time and then inevitably have to provide tech support for another aspect of "why is this not working?"
I just check allow remote access and it just works and I can go about my day doing things I enjoy more because fucking about with Linux and providing tech support are pretty low on that list for me :)
Same. For whatever reason Jellyfin just does not want to work outside of my network. I have fiddled with port numbers, settings, and everything else. I have no idea why it won't work.
Sounds like you're behind cgNAT, which essentially means there's another router owned by your ISP that's between yours and the open internet, which also requires port forwarding, but your ISP will never do that for you.
It complicates things, but the solution(s) are tools like tailscale, cloudflare Tunnels, or to rent a VPS just to host a proxy/vpn.
Plex solves this by using their own public servers as a proxy for you, but this is part of how they have control over your users/server/data, such as blocking remote streaming... That makes more than a few people uncomfortable.
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Plex is more polished, jellyfin is basically functional but we use Plex in our household because we watch movies all the time. I have my own personal jellyfin server on an old computer
How much more polish you need to watch a movie? Jellyfin has everything you need. I keep seeing these discussions and for the life of me I cannot figure out what is missing from jellyfin that people use Plex after all they have been doing for years
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I’m ready to replace plex but unless something major has changed in the last several months I simply can’t understand how people feel jellyfin is a comparable solution to plex. I couldn’t even get past the user interface and it falling flat on its face with media recognition.
Jellyfin is the solution if you have a media file on your computer and you want to stream it to your TV in a different room and Bare Bones works fine. It serves my use cases for a lot of things pretty well, but for hardcore self-hosted streaming Plex still has more features and polish
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To anyone saying they're happy since they already have a lifetime Plex pass, do you really think they won't come for you too?
I paid 79€ almost a decade ago. I got more than my moneys worth. Even the current lifetime (on sale) is less than a year of Netflix. More expensive than piracy + Jellyfin ofc if that’s your benchmark 😀
I have a Jellyfin instance running anyway, I’ll switch to that if Plex enshittifies.
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Introducing "Plex pass plus"! With no advertisements!
This is a "slippery slope' argument and thus a fallacy.
Let users decide how they want to run their own stuff. Right now if you have Plex pass this isn't an issue. If it becomes an issue, then you're in the exact same position you'd be in today if you decided to move away from Plex now.
I moved away from Plex years ago, but I don't blame users for sticking with it, it still has a lot of advantages over jellyfin.
EDIT: Y'all are trippin' over yourselves to complain about what other people choose to deploy on their own hardware.
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Enshittification intensifies
Imagine hosting a software on your own hardware and still choosing the one that makes you dependent on the whims of a corporation lmao
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Plex is not free. Plex is paid software, just like Google Photos or iCloud. The only free software is open source. Open source everything. Doesn’t matter if the client is open source. If the server isn’t, it’s not open source. (I’M LOOKING AT YOU, SNAP!)
Unfortunately this idea that open source is free is a bit toxic in a way. It's definitely not free to make, it takes years of dev time, and sure, those people often do it without any compensation. And therein lies the problem. People here bitching about jellyfin not doing x or y, but doing nothing to support full time development of it's creation, then shitting on the devs for not having a perfect product, leads to good devs leaving OSS behind.
Edit: I'll also say, I get the issues that come with proprietary software in the modern age, especially anything online, but there's almost this push towards not paying for software. Because some software is free and open source, paying for closed source software makes you a rube or something.
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Am I the only one who thinks jellyfin is not only superior to pure, but also way more intuitive to setup? I still don’t understand how plexs routing works, and why I need a central account in order to connect to my own server.
Is it more intuitive to set up for remote streaming to friends...? That's the use case here and as far as I know the answer is a big "no".
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Probably not the only one, but configuring your server for outside access is way easier with Plex.
Since I mainly use these services for streaming my music collection (long time cd collector), I declare that Plexamp is simply superior to jellyfin. It is really awesome and feature-rich and jellyfin does not even come close to Plexamp regarding music in my opinion.
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Anybody still using Plex kind of deserves what they get at this point. They've been announcing these anti-consumer "features" for a while now.
People don’t deserve to be mistreated but it is surprising that folks haven’t abandoned it if they’re so actively anti consumer.
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Two years ago, when I found out that you need damn subscription, to watch YOUR stuff with transcoding on your device in local network, from your local server - I complained on reddit and a lot of people was disagree with me for harsh position.
They_got_what they_focking_deserve.png
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Jellyfin users, how is the transcoding situation? I have a mix of AV1 and H265 and I need to get smooth playback to my living room Apple TV for families’ sake.
All dependent on the hardware you run the server on. Give it a good GPU and you're off to the races
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Lol, guess who just made themselves a target. They are now profiting directly on people who stream content they don't own from other people's servers. Plex is going to go down when Hollywood sues them.
I believe if the server hosting the content has a plex pass then end users are allowed to stream from it without any additional subscription or membership. At least that is how it was several months ago when they announced this.
But you are right, even with the above being true, there will still be a non-insignificant portion of users paying to stream from servers.
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