What is better - Jellyfin or Plex?

Luke Palmer

May 16, 2022 • 3 min read

Maybe you are just setting up your first media server or maybe you are looking to switch from one to the other. I have had my fair share of experience with both and I will go ahead and give you the pros and cons of each.

Comparsion of both Jellyfin and Plex. In depth reasoning listed below for some items.

Client

Switching from Plex to Jellyfin was originally very hard for me. Jellyfin's overall UI definitely needs some work done. For instance, Jellyfin has their own type of viewer called framed. But, since I have an iPhone, apple has their built-in native one. Framed is Jellyfin's take of their own UI which I like more. It has a nice blue theme and looks clean.

With the framed UI, if you have an iPhone that no longer has the home button, the home bar stays on the entire time. You get used to it after a while though. With Apple's native viewer, I simply do not like the look of it. It does however, allow your video to take up your entire screen width and does hide the bar. This does cause you to fullscreen again after already being fullscreened. The downside to it is that you're locked at a terrible aspect ratio.

When I was using Jellyfin with televisions, there were absolutely no options one you are inside a show. You can pause, use subtitles, and that is it. This is the case for me on Roku.

Future Luke here, I recommend using Swiftfin for Jellyfin on mobile to fix these problems. I have been using it for about 2 months and its very well optimized.

Free Content

Whilst Jellyfin does not offer any free content, I would rather have it that way. Plex's free content is extremely crappy. Not only does it completely clog up your feed with moves you will never watch, it also sometimes causes weird strange bugs I was never able to solve. I can't explain this to anyone.

Transcoding

This is the part that really annoys me about Plex. Something that everyone needs to know is that you can't use hardware accelerated transcoding (example: GPU) for free. Jellyfin allows you to do this for free.

Freedom

When I logged into my Plex server, I had to use their authenication servers. This caused issues on multiple occasions were I was simply not allowed to log in. This is also infuriating since you just wanna use your server. Since Plex forces you to use their servers, I was also stuck using Plex Relay. It is basically when the video gets streamed from their servers, not yours. If you do not have a subscription, enjoy watching videos in 334p. There is also no (easy) way to disable Plex Relay. This is really dumb how this is one of multiple ways they try to make you buy a subscription.

I spent so long trying to configure my network (after it was 100% configured correctly) to no avail. It even popped up saying that my server was fully accessible outside my network just to use their Relay system.

The Verdict

Overall, I would say the best short-term and long-term solution is Jellyfin. Whilst it is still a bit rusty in terms of UI, the developers and community care a lot about it. I will soon post my current media server specifications. It is undergoing an upgrade right now, so I can't post it yet.