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New USD prices as of April 29, 2025 will be:
Monthly: $6.99
Yearly: $69.99
Lifetime: $249.99
Oof I paid $75 in 2013 for lifetime lol.
I have a lifetime Plex pass.
I tried out Jellyfin last month.
Now Plex is uninstalled.
Even if we ignore the differences when it comes to matters of FOSS, cost, corporate control, privacy, etc, Jellyfin’s performance is just so much better.
Setting it up to run over https while fully self-hosted was a learning process for somebody who isn’t a web dev, but holy crap was it worth it.
I tried Jelly Fin last month based on a thread here and it was a damned dumpster fire. As bad a Plex is for remote streaming, JF is far worse for the average person.
In what way? I share my server with 8 friends/family and it does everything I need it to.
It’s just not the same. If all you need is local access or tailscale to your instance it’s fine, sure you can cancel Plex. If you’re sharing with friends or family or like the easy access to it that doesn’t require being part of the private network. Also I like subtitles and Plex handles this way better than Jellyfin. At least last time I played with it
Jellyfin is free. Your own domain is like $10 a year or less.
There’s always other free options like duckdns, etc.
If you don’t kind connecting directly with your IP address, you don’t even have to pay a domain. Been doing this for around 2 years
I installed Plex a couple years ago and when I found I actually had to sign into their servers to access my own content it was immediately uninstalled. It was only a matter of time before they pulled this kind of shit.
https://jellyfin.org/ Great alternative to Plex!
I paid for a lifetime Plex Pass years and years ago now, I’ve definitely gotten my money’s worth.
That being said, I fully expect more bullshit like this, up to and including ending my “lifetime” pass.
When that comes to pass, I’m so glad Jellyfin will be available for me to use.
“We regret to inform you that your Lifetime Pass has died in a restructuring related accident. Consider easing your loss by browsing our other pass options.”
I also paid for a lifetime pass and still switched to Jellyfin last year. I find it’s quite a bit better than Plex. The UI leaves a bit to be desired, but the performance for me is way better.
I’d suggest giving it a try
Same here, the Plex app was super heavy on a lot of my devices and would slow them to a crawl. Jellyfin is lean and runs well even on my slow smart projector. It does everything I need it to and more. I also got sick of Plex trying to shove their content and rentals and streaming services down my throat. Couldn’t be happier with Jellyfin.
Lifetime pass for Plex too. A few months ago, it bubbled up an ad-filled version of a show I was watching in front of the show on my server. That is, it showed up in Continue Watching. I was briefly baffled when I started watching an ad on a show that I thought was streaming locally.
Anyway, I switched to Jellyfin. There’s some imperfections, but so far it hasn’t tried to trick me into watching ads.
That’s pretty bad, but I’m not that surprised.
This is my experience too. The web interface is usable, but a bit rough. It is a lot like early Plex web UI. The options for clients are okay on Android / Google TV but they are kinda bad on Apple TV.
Hopefully as more people discover Jellyfin interest in development of both the server and the clients will surpass Plex.
I appreciate what Plex has offered for free for many years now, and I was once a subscriber, but I don’t love it anymore because I’m looking for the straightest path to watching my library on my devices. Jellyfin delivers this better most of the time.
I don’t know what the Apple TV app is like, but I would love if the Android and Roku TV apps were the same as the web and mobile application.
At this point I believe the server is superior to Plex, at least on my experience. Much snappier and streams flawlessly
Performance has been better for me too. I keep both installed on my media server, but I hope one day that I can easily ditch plex
Does Jellyfin have remote play? I’ve had a lifetime PP for years now, but most of my users don’t. I will be installing Jellyfin tomorrow to run parallel until it can be a full replacement, or just forever.
I just was asking someone on here a few weeks back if switching off Plex while already having a PP was worth it. I think the gist was no rush since it’s working, but this news is my canary.
You can enable remote access through firewall rules, port fwding etc but I haven’t done that yet. There’s a service called tailscale that allows remote access to almost any app externally, works really well. Only drawback is that if you’re on mobile, the tailscale app needs to be running for access to work
I use tailscale and nzb360 to remotely access my arr suite and Plex, so I’m at least a bit familiar with it. Getting my other users setup with it might be a bit tougher, but not impossible. The fact that it’s doable is a good enough jumping off point.
Apple tv has a tailscale client, as does android. Both also have jellyfin clients.
I don’t think roku has either.
Roku can die in a fire, so that’s fine. I’ll need to do a little messing around and see what’s up.
As long as you have PP, users streaming remotely from your server can do so without PP (or the mobile app unlock). The client user charge is only for accessing servers that don’t have PP. Still insane they’re charging anything at all for streaming private content from a private server to a private client though.
Thank god for jellyfin. I have a feeling plex would have gone a lot harder with this update if there was no competition.
I missed that part of the article and had a user point it out. Still really dumb of Plex to charge more for something that has little overhead for them, greedy assholes.
You have to set it up yourself. It does not have remote access through someone else’s servers like Emby and Plex do.
Wish they had a client for PS5.
Unfortunately, Sony seems to be really hostile towards allowing most any video player apps on the PS5. They specifically went out of their way to remove DLNA support, and they only just allowed a DLNA-enabled video player on the store 7 months ago… and it’s subscription based.
That’s the biggest reason I haven’t switched to Jellyfin.
I am in the same exact boat. The PS5 is the media machine for us upstairs. I would switch to jellyfin if there was a PS5 client. Glad I’m not alone on this.
Does it not have a web browser?
Deceptive title. If the person hosting the server has Plex pass then it’s still free for other users to use remote playback.
How is it deceptive? No plex pass on the server? No remote streaming.
I see Jellyfin suggested as an alternative to Plex here. I hope it is one day.
At the moment it’s nowhere close.
I’ve been running Jellyfin side-by-side Plex for two years and it’s still not a viable replacement for anyone but me. Parents, my partner, none of the possible solutions for them come anywhere near close to the usability of Plex and its ecosystem of apps for various devices.
That will likely change because plex is getting worse every day and folks can contribute their own solutions to the playback issues. With plex it’s more noise, more useless features. So one gets better (Jellyfin) and one gets worse (Plex).
But at the moment it really isn’t close for most folks who are familiar with the slickness of commercial apps.
Even from the administrative side, Jellyfin takes massively more system resources and it doesn’t reliably work with all my files.
Again, Jellyfin will get there it’s just not a drop in replacement for most folks yet.
And for context I started my DIY streaming / hosting life with a first gen Apple TV (pretty much a Mac mini with component video outs) that eventually got XBMC and then Boxee installed on it. I even have the forksaken Boxee box.
I’m not trying to be a dick, but in what ways is Jellyfin vastly inferior to Plex? I haven’t used Plex before but Jellyfin does everything me and my family need from a streaming service.
It’d probably different for everyone, but in my case, its smart collections and playlists. My family lives off the home screen and pretty much never venture beyond it. Jellyfin cannot do smart collections and the home screen is very bare bones and unpolished. In Plex I have smart collections and playlists that build automatically for them all pinned neatly to the home screen.
The Jellyfin clients are also unpolished in general and buggy. The server works great though. No problems with that.
Was trying to get a friend to switch to jellyfin the other day and it turns out he’s got a weird Hisense projector that uses VIDAA OS, which does not have a jellyfin app, but DOES have a Plex app. I imagine setups like this are probably limiting Jellyfin’s adoption. VIDAA is actually less niche than I thought as well, heaps of cheap-ish TVs and projectors are running it.
I mean, that’s like, your opinion man… I prefer Jellyfin.
But that’s exactly my point - we here in this bubble prefer Jellyfin - but it’s not ready for mass adoption. Even plex is a drop in the bucket.
jellyfin > plex
This might be a good time to remind everyone that Jellyfin is open source, free (as in beer) and is, at this point, a better media streamer than Plex. No fees, no ads, no constant pushing of their streaming content, and still has the watch together feature that Plex went and removed.
The is just better rhetoric gets a bit frustrating tbh, it’s a great bit of software do not get me wrong, but sure still has a lot of issues with more exotic codecs and various colour space conversions. Among some other tech issues
TBH Plex is years ahead on maturity, their dev team is excellent, unfortunately it seems like enshittification has begun for them.
Support Jellyfin not because it’s better, but because it’s open source and it puts users and tech first. Don’t expect it to beat Plex’s performance, quality, or cross-platform availability yet, but expect it to become better as more people donate or get involved.
What’s better, exactly?
I switched years ago from Plex to Jellyfin, and while the UI wasn’t quite as nice, everything else is better.
And I don’t have to pay to use HW transcoding on my own hardware…Honestly, I don’t really understand how people prefer the Plex UI to Jellyfin. No shade, it just doesn’t make sense to me. Plex is incredibly cluttered and busy. Jellyfin is simple and clean. I like the latter a lot more.
Jellyfin looks pretty bad on an iPad. Subtitles setting keep getting reset on their own, it doesn’t understand basic keyboard controls (spacebar to pause), the UI is overall tiny. Oftentimes it will forget to save the spot where I finished watching and on the next launch will happily play the movie from beginning.
Was this with the first party Jellyfin app or with Swiftfin?
If it was with the first party app, I’d definitely recommend giving Swiftfin a try.
Plexamp. Genuinely my favorite audio player since Winamp.
There’s ‘finamp’ for jellyfin which I really like so far.
I haven’t used plexamp though, so I can’t vouch for it as an alternative.
For Android users there’s Symfonium which I find really great
I cannot upvote this enough. “Just migrate to X, it’s every bit as good!” when end users know it’s not is a disingenuous argument and even if they don’t have the technical know-how to explain exactly why they feel this way, they’ll feel the deception. It only reinforces a growing distrust in tech.
The argument has to be made honestly. It’s not quite as good, but almost. Those few things you’ll miss will require an adjustment, but the overall value (a lot of times just literally, it costs less!) will become evident.
I know we’re all Linux nerds here and enthused to get people onboard, but the battle right now we’re facing is one of trust and security and must be grounded in those notions because while great strides have been made in convenience and accessibility, big corps will always be able to bankroll themselves over those points.
Yeah, my problem with it is that it’s always something. I’ve been giving it a go about once a year since they forked from Emby and everytime something has made me drop it.
If I’m having problems with it the handful of times I go to watch something using it, the people I share with DEFINITELY would and now I have to handle their auth crap myself as well.
I’ll probably prioritize just keeping a server going side by side now for a lot longer than a month or two at a time and try to find solutions to my problems. it’s never really been a priority before since Plex worked, but the writing has been on the wall for a while now that the enshittification is in full swing and now I need to make sure I’m ahead of it.
Blah, this sucks.
The only thing Plex has on Jellyfin are client apps. Sever-side… Jellyfin hands down. I was super surprised to see av1 transcoding support… In Plex we JUST got HEVC.
I’m not hating on Plex by any means, but when I have an issue with Plex, Jellyfin picks up the slack. I’ll be using Jellyfin full time after the ATV app re-write.
I am curious, though, what is it that makes you think Jellyfin’s software is inferior? Since I’ve been following, Jellyfin has released new features long before Plex.
I need client side apps and easily sharing libraries with remote friends. Both are pretty hard to give up and not quite there yet.
Jellyfin has native apps for Android, Android TV and iOS.
Does Plex offer native apps (that aren’t just stripped down browsers) for more platforms?
Atm Xbox is my most reliable media player. PlayStation isn’t quite there, but would be a nice to have. My parents aren’t very tech literate and they use their smart TV/cable box. I have a friend with an older Roku/smart stick that’s incompatible. Have they added an app for Apple TV yet?
There is an app, but it’s not receiving updates at the moment. They’re doing a complete re-write. The iOS app has been released, and it’s fantastic. The Infuse app is a great band-aid for the time being.
LDAP can be used, which isn’t bad. There are plenty of options. It’ll never be as easy as letting a 3rd party handle it for you. But, that’s a pro in my book.
I agree the client side apps are taking some time, but the developers are absolute gems.
Plexamp is phenomenal. To my knowledge, Jellyfin doesn’t have anything remotely comparable.
Plexamp is a dandy. Managing music locally is pretty cumbersome, so it hasn’t bothered me much. There are a few decent Jellyfin music apps, but nothing quite as polished. Manet looks promising on iOS, but I haven’t tried it yet. Haven’t jumped back to GrapheneOS quite yet, so I’m a little out of the loop there.
free (as in beer)
wut
There are 2 types of “free”. Liberty, and price. “Free as in beer” means they mean the price version of the word. It’s a really old saying now.
Todays word of the day is…Enshitification!
That’s the word of this decade.
No love for Emby here?
I have a lifetime membership to Emby premium. I just switched to Jellyfin. Emby is kind of dead in the water as far as development. Not abandoned but not really forging ahead. And it doesn’t have as much community plug-in support. If you like the features as they are, it’s a good platform. I got enough years out of my premium payment to not fully regret it, but I’m not going to let it anchor me to a stale feature set. I don’t need the support and I can always fall back to it if I have to.
How else would they continue developing their social features that no one fucking asked for?
Meanwhile they remove the social features that people DO like and use like watch together
People gotta justify their jobs!
I’m not sure I understand the need for charging to play media on a private server when not on the local network. Why is this no longer going to be free? I’m glad I bought a lifetime pass many many years back but I definitely wouldn’t pay for Plex nowadays with alternatives being comparable. What a silly choice they made~
I’m not defending them because it’s a shit move, but they clearly understand the most valuable feature is not their ad-ridden free content but rather the original value prop of the service to make it easy to share personal media with small groups of friends.
It reeks of “we’re routing your traffic through our own servers to check your media for piracy” to me.
Why would they check for piracy when it’s not them you’re pirating from and stopping piracy would remove the most popular use case of their product?
They do have a proxy service, but it is optional. I have it disabled because my server is faster.
I could see the proxy slipping behind a paywall as that feature has costs, but web accessibility? That’s basic function of a video server.
I run jellyfin in a container and it is amazing. Give it a try.
So Plex just killed itself? Got it. Lmao bye Felicia nobody’s paying the middleman for shit they are hosting on their OWN FUCKING HARDWARE.
These seem like reasonable changes
They are updating the app at some point, which is removing the watch together feature. I wonder what else may disappear.
