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this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2025
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Why would anyone use Plex over jellyfin anyway? The writing was on the wall years ago.
Because its more polished, has more platforms for clients to run on, and can be remotely shared with a simple account login and no configuration required. To name a few.
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
Come on, I love libre software as much as the next Lemming, but the Plex TV and mobile app is leagues ahead in terms of usability over jellyfin.
I still prefer jellyfin for many other reasons, but in terms of UX and UI for the average person it's an easy win for Plex
For remote streaming to, say, your mum's house? (Or a friend, etc)?
Yes, after I set up the server properly (reverse proxy). With this change the same setup on the server side is necessary for remote streaming with free Plex.
My mum puts in the domain, username and password and starts streaming.
Guess what I didn’t have to setup with Plex or Emby.
That's because you had somone elses servers doing that part for you.
Good.
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.
Not doubting your experience at all. For all I know it’s a new option; I just discovered it, but for the other folks like me still stuck with Plex, most (all?) of this can be disabled in the Online Media Sources setting on the server (yeah - I know 🙄)…
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.
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.
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
Working "watched" labels on the Apple TV client would be nice. Not having those is a deal breaker for me considering 99% of my use case is streaming media to my Apple TV over LAN.
I have Jellyfin running along side Plex in case I want to do remote streaming, but I never use it and generally just copy the files for what I want to watch to my laptop if I'm going to be watching something away from home. Or I can just VPN in to my home network.
Currently my biggest complain with Jellyfin and the reason I can't switch to it completely is the bad subtitle support. There's a bunch of clients and some subtitles work on one, but not the other and vise versa. It's annoying to jump clients depending on what you watch. Sometimes subtitles just don't want to load by default and you have turn them on for each episode. And even though I have Bazaar, sometimes I still need to download subtitles, and Plex has that built-in.
Either way, I already have lifetime subscription, there's no point in switching. At this point I'll only switch if JF becomes better or Plex becomes worse.
Yeah, I would love to use Jellyfin over Plex but the ability to reliably select subtitles on Apple TV is crucial. I can’t do this currently.
I switched from a heavily used Plex server with about 10 users to Jellyfin with the samw usage patterns abour half a year ago. So far it's been pretty smooth sailing. A better world is possible!
Plex still has the most fully-featured music streaming app (Plexamp)
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
Might want to take another look at Jellyfin. My experience has been that as long as the video file s are at least somewhat reasonably named and organized, Jellyfin has no problems identifying a file and looking up its metadata.
I dunno what you were doing wrong, but Jellyfin is a strong alternative to Plex that has feature parity. The only reason to use Plex over Jellyfin is if you want the streaming channels Plex has. Especially since many of the features Plex has are locked behind a paywall, whereas on Jellyfin they are free.
I use consoles because I have kids. Ps5 doesn't have jellyfin but does have plex in its store.
Can I install/use jellyfin directly on my tv? That's the only think keeping me on pkex (I haven't tried jellyfin but I'm open to other options)
It depends on the TV. They have official clients for Android TV, webOS and some more.
Depends on the TV. They have an official app on Android TVs, but I still happily use Chromecast for everything