Selfhosted

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.

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 :)

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

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.

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.

I paid 79€ almost a decade ago. I got more than my moneys worth. Even the current lifetime (on sale) is less than a year of Netflix. More expensive than piracy + Jellyfin ofc if that’s your benchmark 😀

I have a Jellyfin instance running anyway, I’ll switch to that if Plex enshittifies.

Introducing "Plex pass plus"! With no advertisements!

This is a "slippery slope' argument and thus a fallacy.

Let users decide how they want to run their own stuff. Right now if you have Plex pass this isn't an issue. If it becomes an issue, then you're in the exact same position you'd be in today if you decided to move away from Plex now.

I moved away from Plex years ago, but I don't blame users for sticking with it, it still has a lot of advantages over jellyfin.

EDIT: Y'all are trippin' over yourselves to complain about what other people choose to deploy on their own hardware.

Is it more intuitive to set up for remote streaming to friends...? That's the use case here and as far as I know the answer is a big "no".

Probably not the only one, but configuring your server for outside access is way easier with Plex.

Since I mainly use these services for streaming my music collection (long time cd collector), I declare that Plexamp is simply superior to jellyfin. It is really awesome and feature-rich and jellyfin does not even come close to Plexamp regarding music in my opinion.

Unfortunately this idea that open source is free is a bit toxic in a way. It's definitely not free to make, it takes years of dev time, and sure, those people often do it without any compensation. And therein lies the problem. People here bitching about jellyfin not doing x or y, but doing nothing to support full time development of it's creation, then shitting on the devs for not having a perfect product, leads to good devs leaving OSS behind.

Edit: I'll also say, I get the issues that come with proprietary software in the modern age, especially anything online, but there's almost this push towards not paying for software. Because some software is free and open source, paying for closed source software makes you a rube or something.

People don’t deserve to be mistreated but it is surprising that folks haven’t abandoned it if they’re so actively anti consumer.

All dependent on the hardware you run the server on. Give it a good GPU and you're off to the races

I believe if the server hosting the content has a plex pass then end users are allowed to stream from it without any additional subscription or membership. At least that is how it was several months ago when they announced this.

But you are right, even with the above being true, there will still be a non-insignificant portion of users paying to stream from servers.