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?
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
?! 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.
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.
Something I don’t see talked about enough with Jellyfin is that the UI is much nicer than Plex. It’s so clean and uncluttered, where Plex is this bizarre mess of unclear controls and advertised content.
I couldn’t disagree more and I think you’re in the minority here.
Plex UI is just leagues ahead. Also last I checked the desktop app UI and Android TV ui is pretty bad also. Its just the Web UI in a wrapper.
I’m new to both, and both are terrible if you ask me, but for different reasons. Where I see plex having a clear UI advantage is where it comes with a native app for that platform, which is less often the case of jellyfin (although it’s slowly catching up). Being open source, jellyfin has a clear advantage IMO because with enough traction, the community will be able to do wonderful things (think of winamp skins meets android custom ROM scene, or something to that effect).
And as a new comer having only seen the freemium side of plex, it has really weirded me out in some places (sponsored stuff, stuff of no use to me that I can’t disable, locked out stuff, including petty stuff like HDR encoding…) , so much so that I don’t see myself trusting them my credit card, and so I might never get to experience the “real thing”. That’s just how my perception of it is: Plex probably needs me to pay for it to become good, but it won’t be that much better (and still have many quirks) to justify it.
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.
I used Plex for years.
As soon as I tried Jellyfin with a limited section of my library I was immediately finished with Plex.
- Jellyfin works with no internet connection with no stuffing around
- The app is far quicker and more responsive and IMO it looks world’s better
- It handles mixed media libraries better
- 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.
Your 4th point is the opposite for me, any kind of subtitles I have on causes transcoding in jellyfin. Its the only thing stopping me from switching fully.
Set “Burn Subtitles” to AUTO and grab the Open Subtitles plugin and make sure you are logged in. Beware opensubtitles.com and opensubtitles.org are different logins.
I’d say about 95% of what I’m playing is playing without transcoding to my LG CX Oled with Jellyfin app on it.
I don’t know enough about the triggers for transcoding to know why I’m getting this result, but my server has an obscene GPU in it. I’m not sure if this is a factor.
What are the main advantages to plex?
AFAIK they offer more apps resp. apps for more platforms. Apart from that, nothing really. Maybe a little more idiot-proof.
This is pretty much it, Plex offers far more client apps that are full featured and they make it super easy to setup and use both as an admin and a user. Especially for things like OTA TV where they provide the guide data once it’s setup (which is why it’s a paid option). I’d move to JellyFin in a heartbeat if they’d support OTA and DVR playback on AppleTV.
…they do but, you have to supply the schedule. I was using a Home run to pipe OTA tv in but, have since moved to a IPtv provider. Works very very well
