Honest question, because I know multiple people who are not looking to jump ship since they already have the Plex Pass.
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 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.
For 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.
Well now I can sell my account for 500
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Plex doesn’t charge to just stream locally so I haven’t bothered switching or looking into switching yet.
Tried Jellyfin. It puked when it saw my library.
I bought plex lifetime years ago when it was like 125.
I still hate the new plex app ui on roku. It’s clunky and sucks. The alternative is to break my library in sections and hope something else will maybe work.
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.
Sucks to add users to, users can’t reset their own password, and apparently security is so bad that exposing it to the internet is basically just giving hackers the front door key.
I have both technically running. The metadata matching on jellyfin is complete ass, so I have to manually match up like a third of my library, or reconfigure the files (absolutely not happening) which I just dgaf enough to do when vanishingly few people would be able to use it, so its only partially set up. It also can’t be accessed by anyone because I’m not dumb enough, nor smart enough, to open it up to the internet (I don’t know how to do it safely and I’m thus entirely not interested in trying).
Plex, by contrast, is already configured (and if I have to scrap the library and start over, as I’ve done several times, its pretty easy to reconfigure), the metadata linking is correct and automatic most of the time, everyone already has access to it, and it just works for them, and thus for me. I’m not giving it up just because a bunch of hyper-nerds on the internet say it’s bad for, frankly, nonsense reasons that don’t apply or matter to me or honestly most people who use it. I’ll wait until it -actually- is bad for my use, or until jellyfin serves the use I have for it, which it absolutely does not do presently, and may never. (And no, a vpn or whatever setup is not a solution, it’s just one more thing to maintain and fuck with constantly to keep it working for people who don’t even know what a vpn is. Hard pass.)
I wouldn’t pay for plex now, nor in the last several years, and I strongly discourage my users from doing so, but spent money is spent, so might as well keep using what I paid for until it doesn’t work for me anymore. I mean really, why not? I genuinely haven’t seen any valid reasons to get rid of it, and lots of reasons to keep it.
The metadata matching on jellyfin is complete ass, so I have to manually match up like a third of my library
Does Plex somehow do a better job of figuring out special features metadata? Because other than that, you follow the naming schemes, and Jellyfin has had a 100% hit rate for me.
I’m not really sure what you mean by special feature in this context, but plex pulls the meta largely without needing to rename files (some exceptions, but they are very obvious, like if there’s words/numbers before the title for some reason, like when I ripped my 13 hours of classic monster movies and they were numbered), and it usually doesn’t care about extra stuff like encoding info and whatnot. Hardly need to manually match anything when it gets added, and never need to manually match shows. Handfull of stuff if I rebuild the server from scratch, but those files mostly don’t have metadata to begin with (some youtube rips, some documentaries that probably came out of a series, that sort of thing). It just seems to be a lot more forgiving, I guess.
I’m just not super interested at the moment in going through my entire library, which would take half of forever, to rename everything to make it work properly. Especially when I already did/do that for plex’s requirements, and it works fine. I assumed when I set jellyfin up it would pull the same, but it doesn’t, in my experience.
Just let Sonarr/Radarr do the renaming automatically.
Genuinely don’t know how to set those things up, and “my personal IT” doesn’t know either because they also have limited docker experience, and no media management experience, the media stuff is my contribution, and I do it painfully manually (i like curating, so its largely fine, but its painfully manual). i’ve been looking into it on and off for a hot minute. But I have zero docker experience which is the main way those things are done afaik.
If you know of a good guide for those things, one that doesn’t assume you are a whiz with docker already, I’d be interested. Personal IT person does security and used to sysadmin, so I’m sure they could figure it out if i can’t, but we haven’t found any particularity good guides for it that were digestible without the background knowledge. Something neither of us has any other reason to learn, so hasn’t been done.
I found the guides overwhelming too at the start, but then I skipped them and just went for it with a simple container in a compose file (doesn’t even have to be sonarr).
The benefit of containerisation is that if you break it, it’s simple to remove the container, delete the config folder and start again without affecting your system. Give it fake data files to munch on and it’s unlikely to ruin anything if you muck it up.
So I did that a few times until I got the basic relationship between the docker compose file and the functions of the program. THEN I looked up some guides on the arrs and saw I needed to structure the volumes better, but that’s fine because I could wipe clean and go again.
Only when it worked predictably and I understood it did I let it loose on my library.
The good news is that if you figure Sonarr out, Radarr is almost exactly the same. As are all the arrs.
And then if you need some of them to route through a VPN container, that’s just one line in the file. And so on. Before you know it there are 20+ services and they’re easily managed.
So from services on a single compose, I can mark a show to follow, it’ll automatically download on release, rename itself, any extraneous subtitles and audio tracks removed, ingest to the media server, and delete the files when they’ve been watched. Basically, all I do is ask for the show and watch it. Everything else is automatic.
I understood about a third of that tbh.
Im the sort of person why plex is still a big thing. Just enough knowledge, but not enough for all the things.
I know docker isn’t the only option (idk if thats what you mean) but idk any of what you proposed as alternative. Ill send this to IT person, maybe they’ll get it, but i don’t :) i want to get the things, but i don’t have the background knowledge to make them digestible. Have a degree in technical communication, so very good at learning, more for science than tech, unless I can find a good tech guide first and then I’m great (but tech people are notoriously shit at documentation for anyone even remotely lacking in tech skill)
I meant in the use case of ripping my entire Blu Ray library for a new Jellyfin install, the only thing that’s been difficult for me to match has been the special features. So I guess the friction you’re running into is that you’ve already got these files named for Plex, and the migration is the hard part?
Sort of, I guess? It probably would be very different if I’d been naming them in a way that works for jelly from the start, but it’s just a massive undertaking at this point to… retrofit, for lack of a better term coming to mind.
I was under the impression they used the same agent for metadata, but they must not, or there must be some changes in how Plex handles stuff.
Gotcha. I hear you can run a utility outside of Plex to do the conversion, but I do have the luxury in this case of starting from scratch, myself.
Good to know, I’ll have to look into that. I’d like my jelly set up for the very few highly technical people I know who can manage their own connections (I got my limited technical skills somewhere!!), as well as my own home use, so thats helpful. Also to have a backup option for the person I care enough about to manage a VPN for (literally one person, but I also want them to have access to my calibre database as well as share folders for GOG games, and they are with it enough to learn what I teach them for maintaining the connection)
Im not sure exactly when I became a data hoarder, but I certainly am now, and more tools are good. Thanks for that info :)
I already tried to setup jellyfin for a couple days before I bought the $120 Plex pass. I could not get it to work at all and it was frustrating reading all the vulnerabilities with the internet.
Plex took me 5 minutes to setup and all my friends can access my media no problem.
For ease of use, Plex wins Everytime.
setup
set up. “Setup” is a noun that lost its hyphen.
everytime
every time. Otherwise it’s not a word at all.
Do you understand how language evolves? It’s ok to be “wrong” as long as you’ve communicated successfully.
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.
oh I forgot about Plexamp. Its been my main music app since it also does Android auto.
It just works so well and nothing else comes close so far.
