462
this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2025
462 points (98.3% liked)
Selfhosted
53204 readers
2197 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Why would anyone use Plex over jellyfin anyway? The writing was on the wall years ago.
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
I believe you. I feel that way about iTunes (trauma intensifies).
But Jellyfin doesn't have that reputation.
Are you seriously telling us you reading from three reddit threads from almost a decade ago and consider that "reputation"?
I am beginning to remember what made me think Jellyfin wasn't user friendly.
Maybe it wasn't the user interface after all.
For remote streaming to, say, your mum's house? (Or a friend, etc)?
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.
Not sure about swiftfin but try the option
downmix to stereosomewhere in the client playback settingsThis 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.
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.
Yeh these are things I realise and I know there are solutions. The way Plex does it isnt ideal but also it works for me and my current knowledge level.
Maybe in the future as I learn more I can move on but right now it works for me and I dont have the time or motivation to put into learning everything else I need right now, as with everyone else in the world right now there is a lot of other shit going on that it just isnt high on my priority list unfortunately.
I'm still in my first year of self hosting personally and as well as being a Linux newbie I have learnt a lot and it has been a steep learning curve with everything.
I only bring it up because you explicitly said you have no idea why it doesn't work.
Take things at a comfortable pace; there's no sense overwhelming yourself. Then you just forget what you've done and end up lost in your own maze.
I started with Plex myself, almost 10 years ago. Moved to Emby, where I learned about buying a domain, setting up ssl through a reverse proxy, and just continued to explore from there. Today I run ~26 containers/projects across three systems and I'm always keeping my eye out for interesting new things.
Best of luck with your journey m8.
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
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.
Both will happen.
Besides.
For me it has worked everywhere. All of my media is in .mkv so it already contains the subtitles. It works in all browsers clients, Desktop clients, TV and Mobile clients. Works in VLC and MPV as well on desktop, TV and Mobile. Works with Kodi as well. Works on same network (via both host IP and reverse proxy) as well as remotely via Pangolin.
So you can try putting everything in one MKV Container or maybe change the subtitle formats (if that's a thing).
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!
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.
Plex still has the most fully-featured music streaming app (Plexamp)
Jellyfin is notoriously full of security holes. It's recommended to not expose it to the Internet. It's also easy easier on Plex, at least until this bullshit, to have a random non-techie family member sign in to your Plex server from anywhere. I never liked Plex and never got into it, but I see why people used to prefer it.
I think Emby is a good middle ground for people looking to jump ship from Plex. But I switched to jellyfin from my lifetime Emby sub because the plug-in community there feels dead and Emby development felt dead in the water.
Please do explain or link sources to what you think are “security holes”.
It has several unsecured endpoints.
https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/issues/5415
If you read the comments the devs know it's a serious issue but don't want to break backwards compatibility fixing them. Their solution for now is to warn people of the risks of exposing their instance to the Web. Which I don't think they're doing a great job of.
Aside from most of those being “potential issues”, which weren’t proven, the rest are GETs of things that do not need to be secret, things like album art and list of installed plugins. Besides the one plugin issue, which was an actual security issue, which was fixed over a year and a half ago. https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin/pull/11436
Contrast that with Plex which has numerous high severity CVEs that include things like remote code execution, directory traversal, and more.
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
Using jellyfin on Chromecast. For the past 3 weeks I'm stuck not being able to use it because some update broke subtitles support for external players. App became useless, I can't downgrade it, and the bug is still not fixed.
Not going to use Plex, just my 2 cents.