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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.