If Jellyfin covers all your needs and you’re already familiar with it, there’s not much reason to change to Plex.

Plex pass will let you skip intros and credits. It’s a nice-to-have. It will let you download your media to your phone/laptop so you can view it without an internet connection. Also a nice-to-have, but not a huge selling point.

I like Plex for how easy it is to access my media from outside my network. The apps are great, and it’s easy to add family and friends so they get access too. With Plex pass you can give them filtered access - great with kids in the house.

My Plex server runs from my Synology 920+, and I’ve never had any luck getting transcoding to be a useful feature - lots of freezes and buffering. Better to have the arr’s grab media in a format that will direct play on the client and not bother with the headache.

I use PlexAmp and it’s a very good music player on par with anything else.

Nothing is so good/problem free that I wouldn’t replace it in a heartbeat the moment Plex does some questionable changes to the service. I got my Plex pass many years ago at a third of the cost that it is today, and I didn’t really know what I was getting, other than making the Plex app free for everyone logging in to my server.

I don’t mind paying for the past and future development of a service I enjoy. Transcoding is an essential feature for me. While it’s a free feature of the processor, developing software support for it took effort. Other services provide that support for free, but Plex bundles it with other features they charge for. I think that’s fine. As I see it my money goes to support the full experience, from wide app support and good UI to Plexamp and other fun and useful side projects. In fact in a way I am subsidizing much of the experience for free users. Again, I don’t mind, as long as it means Plex’s development and maintenance continues.

I don’t get why people get so tribal about this. I think it’s great Jellyfin is a free and open alternative and if that works for you, fantastic!

Well, It Just Works™. Until recently I haven’t had any reason to change. It’s user friendly, easy to set up and looks great.

Though I’ll be switching to Jellyfin soon, when I have the time, because (for reasons irrelevant to this comment) my NAS where Plex is located doesn’t have access to the internet which somehow means Plex cannot show me my local files which I’m not particularly fond of.

What I’ll be missing when I make the switch is an app for Tizen TVs.

Plex is still on top for sharing your server with others and offers clients on so many more platforms. My TV for example is a Samsung and there is no Jellyfin app for it. I run both side by side because I prefer jellyfin for use on my devices but there’s a time where having plex there is useful

Jellyfin isn’t even close to the level of polish and ease of use as plex. It’s junk when compared side by side.

Why?

Because I picked up a lifetime pass over 10 years ago, long before Jellyfin/Emby was even heard of.

Back then, it worked perfectly fine, and now it works, perfectly fine.

It has a good app on my Rokus/Shields. It just works.

When, it stops working, or they pull something stupid, I have Jellyfin already ready to go.

Until then though, plex reigns king. (Also, I like its interface more then Jellyfin)

I moved from plex to jellyfin. I was on plex at first because I was a noob at docker, and plex had a simple package install for my Synology.

It’s cheap, has more features and just works. The cost for me was <$100 at least 4-5+ years ago and my only issue has been a metadata DB corruption due to an unplanned shutdown.

1. No app. Just web required
2. No user management - that’s handled by someone else (Plex)
3. Stupid simple (app for everything) so end users (family) don’t have to… figure it out. Thus fewer IT tickets for me.
4. Just works.

Same reason people pay for windows instead of using Linux for gaming. You can accomplish the same task on both but one has more support and is more mature.

Plex has more quality of life features than jellyfin. And for most, that is worth the cost and closed source nature of Plex.

If you’re happy with jellyfin there is no need to switch. Especially to free Plex.

I like Plex due to legacy compatibility. I have an old Samsung TV from 2012 and Plex still works on that.

I don’t need to pay anything and I can see my movies everywhere in the world thanks to vpn hosting.

It does exactly what I need.

Plex has gotten worse and worse over the years. The second Jellyfin supports Tizen I will probably switch (Samsung TV OS)

For me plex just seems to be better in all aspects. It is more “polished”. Quick example, I have more than a few movies that are in 2 parts (moviename_cd1.mp4, moviename_cd2.mp4). In plex I see one poster for the movie and when it plays it seamlessly plays both in sequence. In jellyfin I get two posters for the same movie. Very small issue but it is one of many that keep me in plex,

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Add to this that the plex app on mobile, smart tv, appletv, toaster, etc just works. If I want to let my family or friends watch something its simple.

Further, plexamp is fantastic.

First, lets get all of this cleared up.

Plex came first. It was a fork of XBMC(which became Kodi).
Technically, most users could just run Kodi with a central library database and get most of the same benefits. The problem is that would primarily work for local players and wouldn’t work well for remote operations.
Plex got ridiculously popular back in the day because it had the same attitude as Kodi when it came to addons. There were a ridiculous number of addons that essentially made piracy seamless. So, Plex was a popular option for people who wanted to pirate movie streams, organize media, and do a lot of other things. This is when Plex started to surpass Kodi in popularity.

Emby came second, as an open-source alternative to Plex. One difference was that it never really allowed plugins in any significant way and therefore didnt get as popular. When Emby went closed source a few years ago, some people forked it off into Jellyfin.

Jellyfin came last. Plex and Emby had closed source their products primarily because of remote transcoding. So for quite a while, the transcoding on Jellyfin was trash. It also had a number of weird quirks and bugs. It was fairly half-baked. I personally bought Plex lifetime after Jellyfin came out because Jellyfin wasn’t mature and Emby cost money too.

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At the end of the day, Plex has actually gone backwards in features because they are trying to be a more acceptable product. This means fewer mods for piracy features and they’ve killed some of the other features while adding in their “free streaming” options and some other questionable decisions.
But Emby has died and Jellyfin is still a poor substitute. Can you use Jellyfin? Absolutely. Wouldn’t even blame you if you do it. You can also run Kodi as described. But I absolutely felt it was worth it to stop fiddling with Jellyfin and just run something that worked and rarely crashed, had errors, etc.

I really like “Discover” in combination with the play/watch list.