We make a Jellyfin client, so treat everything here accordingly. We have also tried to be straight about the places Plex is genuinely better, because a comparison that finds no fault with its own side is not worth reading.
The main difference that explains the rest
Plex is a privately owned product. There is a company, a subscription, an account system, and servers in the middle that make things work. That is why it is easy, and it is why the company can change the terms on users, leading to some more recent controversy that drove many long-standing users away from Plex and over to Jellyfin.
Jellyfin is a program you run. There is no company, no account, no middle. It’s open-source, meaning the code base is open, it does not charge for its use, and the code base is community maintained. That is why it is less likely to change under you for profit motivated reasons, and it is why some elements of the product and the way it handles your media are more in your control.
Almost every other difference follows from this major distinction.
Where Plex is better
Remote access configures itself
This is the big one. Plex arranges the connection, works around awkward routers, and relays when it has to, and generally makes the networking side of things a user-friendly solved problem. Jellyfin does none of that, and getting to your server from outside is a job you have to handle yourself, with a VPN or a reverse proxy. Neither is hard, but both require some technical expertise, or a great guide which we have written for you.
More clients on more televisions
Plex is available on phones, tablets, smart televisions and set-top boxes, as ‘Plex’ - a single app they distribute. Jellyfin has a basic 1st party client on most major platforms, and being open there is a rich community of 3rd party client apps designed with different experiences and user needs in mind. If you do most of your watching on a television and you don’t have an Apple TV, check before you switch that the Jellyfin client app you want to use is available there.
Sharing with other people is simpler
Plex has accounts, invitations and a sharing model that works without the other person doing anything technical. On Jellyfin the server admin (probably you) creates accounts for other users manually and defines what privileges they have, and if they have issues it’s on you to help them, rather than a company with a support team. Jellyfin does have community forums, but the turnaround and quality of help you get will be different. Luckily there is plenty of documentation out there, and AI can be just as much of a tool to help diagnose and solve technical problems today as any other medium.
Discovery and watchlists
Plex has built a layer above your library for finding things to watch, including free content, a service they are paid to present, and you may not want it, but it’s there. Jellyfin shows you your library, and whatever else you connect to it - such as free live TV services. Whether that is a loss depends entirely on whether you wanted the extra layer.
It is finished
Plex has had a lot of design attention over a long time. Jellyfin’s 1st party interface is good and improving, but is not as polished. Thankfully the rich ecosystem of third party clients gives you choice, but these are developers also and most come with a small subscription cost to continue using those preferred client apps.
Where Jellyfin is better
Hardware transcoding is free
On Plex, hardware transcoding sits behind Plex Pass. The chip doing the work is already in your machine, and unlocking it is a subscription. On Jellyfin it is just a setting, and for anyone whose server needs to transcode, that alone can be the deciding factor.
Plex has since put remote streaming behind a paid plan as well, so watching your own files from outside your own home is something you pay for too. Neither restriction is a technical one. Both are things your own hardware was always able to do by itself.
Nothing is in the middle
No account, no company knowing what you watched, no service to sign in to, and no server anywhere else in the path. Your library is on your machine and the connection is direct.
Nobody can change the terms
Plex has changed what is free and what is not several times. Jellyfin cannot do that: it is open source, it runs on your hardware, and the version you have keeps working.
No advertising, ever
Plex added free ad-supported content to its apps. Whether it bothers you is personal; that it can appear at all is structural. Jellyfin has none of this.
Plugins go further
Jellyfin lets you add things Plex would not allow, because there is nobody to disallow them. There is a library of searchable plugins in a preapproved directory, or load your own directly, it’s your server and you do whatever you want.
It costs nothing
Jellyfin has no paid tier. It’s a free and open-source product, with no incentives to change its service to eke more money from you as a customer. Its only incentive is to create a good media serving and watching experience, giving you the freedom to run and watch your content how you want.
Where they are about equal
Library management, metadata and artwork are much the same. Both read the same databases, both want the same filenames, both get it right most of the time. In fact you can point both at the same libraries simultaneously.
Playback quality is identical when direct playing, because both are sending you the same file.
Both run on anything. Windows, macOS, Linux, Docker, a NAS.
On an iPhone or iPad
Plex’s app is mature and does a lot. Having paid tiers, they are incentivised to produce a high quality experience.
The Jellyfin side has more than one option, including ours, and the useful question is not which app has more features but how an app plays your files. An app that asks the server to re-encode everything gives you a worse picture and a hot server. An app that plays the file as it is gives you exactly what you own, at the potential cost of bandwidth - you get to choose the trade-offs.
Note
JellyMold is our client, and that is what it is built around: direct playback of your files, native subtitle rendering, and nothing asked of your server. It is out now on iPhone and iPad, and the panel at the foot of this page is the honest extent of the pitch.
Which should you choose
Choose Plex if your main screen is a smart television Jellyfin does not support, or you are sharing with several people who will not install anything, or you want remote access to work without thinking about it and would rather pay than arrange it.
Choose Jellyfin if you want no company in the middle, or your server needs to transcode and you do not want to pay a subscription for the hardware you already own, or you have been irritated by a change to Plex’s terms, or you simply want the thing you run to be yours. Perhaps you found a client you really prefer the experience of, or if you believe in open-source software. There are many good reasons to choose Jellyfin, it just takes a little more effort to get things set up, but once they are, they will only need touching if something breaks or changes in your setup, and we’ve tried to provide a comprehensive set of guides on this site to help make it that much easier to get going.
Choose both, for a while
They coexist happily, pointed at the same folders. Run Plex and Jellyfin side by side while you decide is the least stressful way to answer this, and it costs you nothing but disk space for a second set of metadata.
If you are switching
The order that causes the least pain is in Moving from Plex to Jellyfin. The part everyone worries about, the watch history, has its own guide, because it is the thing that stalls migrations halfway.