this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
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Honest question, because I know multiple people who are not looking to jump ship since they already have the Plex Pass.

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[–] GasMaskedLunatic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 30 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (6 children)

Lifetime Pass holder here. Used to run Jellyfin alongside Plex. Had crashing issues and had to shut Jellyfin down for quite a bit. Came back after a while and started Jellyfin from scratch. None of my users ever chose Jellyfin over Plex.

  • The UI is slower (at least on Windows), clunkier, and uglier. Hopefully this gets fixed in the upcoming big update they have planned for the desktop client. Their Roku app is actually on par with Plex's though.
  • The admin dashboard is confusing and in my opinion awful.
  • Downloaded content is not viewable within the app on Android. This is the complaint I've heard the most from my user who made a significant effort to switch. Ironically, after the New Experience update this became less of an issue since Plex ruined downloads.
  • Plexamp's UI, radios, and sonic similarity feature were, last I checked, unmatched by a long-shot. I use my music library heavily. If I make the switch fully away from Plex, I'll probably opt for something more specialized like Navidrome.
  • Manually setting the edition of a movie is so much easier on Plex, and for someone who likes to have multiple editions, it's less confusing for the user to see each edition individually labelled in the library than selecting the movie and being expected to know which file name they should pick. Not every file is named to Jellyfin's standards because that would make them harder to add to my torrent client, and some don't have their editions in the file name at all and I just have them hand-labelled in Plex based on run time.
  • I'm still trying to setup my DVR in Jellyfin and can't get it to work. Plex works fine, Jellyfin just won't. It's a moot point at the moment, but once I do get it to work, unless things have changed over the years, the channel guide is a whole other set of challenges.

I'm willing to deal with this personally simply because Plex creates just as much, if not more of a headache for me as an administrator and the bloat is ridiculous, but not a single one of my users has switched, and I don't blame them. They don't have to deal with the administrative difficulties, so there's no benefit to them except being able to download files to their system instead of just in the app, which none of them care about. If nobody is going to use it, my focus ends up being on Plex anyway. I have been pushing Jellyfin for a year and a half. None of my friends or family want to use it unless Plex borks something, and even then they want Plex back.

Jellyfin just isn't on par with Plex, no matter how much I wish it was. It's death by a thousand cuts on both the user and administrative ends. It would be one thing if I were a free user or actively paying for Plex, but as a Lifetime Pass holder, I just can't justify it yet.

[–] toebert@piefed.social 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's a small piece in your observation but I've been on the hunt for an android client for jellyfin with downloads that are.. usable. Fladder has been so far the only one where this seemed to work okay-ish (it's still slow, and I noticed it doesn't detect if the device supports Dolby vision to force transcoding). But still, if your one user is still trying.. maybe it helps them a lil.

I'll take a look at it and let them know. At the moment they're back on Plex, but if this app works the way they want, they may be open to switching. Thanks!

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I would recommend Symfonium for muaic listening.
It has an insane feature set (and it can support both Plex and Jellyfin libraries

One of my killer features of it are rolling cache. And you can decide how big and how it behaves to cache songs

I use Jellyfin to listen music at best on desktop at work through the browser

[–] tko@tkohhh.social 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Can you explain rolling cache? I'm pretty sure plexamp does this, but maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're referring to.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

My phone UI is german so I translated it with google. Text should be accurate enough

It's essentially like Spotify does it (probably)

Should something be unclear, give me a heads up :)

[–] tko@tkohhh.social 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Gotcha... Yes, Plexamp does this as well:

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago

Probably inspired by it.
It's a neat feature :)

[–] Dran_Arcana@lemmy.world 5 points 2 days ago

For music enthusiasts plexamp is also basically unbeatable. I welcome the day open source catches up.

[–] 1hitsong@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Their Roku app is actually on par with Plex’s though.

I can't tell if that's a complement or a dig 🤣

I meant it as a compliment. Lol. Both of the Roku apps are fairly functional as far as I've been able to observe.

[–] muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago

Nothing in the self hosted space is taken seriously on windows. There’s a reason for that. Jellyfin on Linux is fine. I’m a fucking smooth brain and if I can do it, a crack enhanced autistic monkey can do it.

Plexamp is better. I will give you that. There’s nothing outright bad about jellyfins take on music. Apps like Discrete make it quite nice, but plexamp just satisfies that out-of-box itch.

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

As an observer in these comments, this is a great answer. Thanks for typing it out.

It does seem like some "cuts" could be ironed out reasonably quickly, like the file naming issue or UI lag.