this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
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Weirdest ad for Jellyfin I’ve ever seen
It's so weird though. Do they not know it exists? Do they expect their customers not to know it exists?
When your primary competition is free (and arguably better), the last thing one should think to do is raise prices.
I can only assume that some C-suites are looking at numbers and don't know what else to do but make the product more expensive.
Jellyfin isn’t arguably better, especially for some of tne main things people use Plex for - remote streaming and library sharing. Jellyfin pretty much doesn’t support them.
How?
The argument for Plex is their catalogue.
No, the argument for plex is that it's easy and widely supported. It has an app on every device in existence, and a new user can be streaming from a friends server remotely within minutes of asking for access, with no VPN or IP whitelisting or any other workaround required. Secure, fast, easy.
What platform doesn’t support Jellyfin?
The rest of that applies to Jellyfin as well, I just give you the url and the account details then you’re good to go.
90% of the TVs out there. Not everyone has an android tv.
What url are you giving me for jellyfin? You’ve exposed jellyfin to the open internet? You know how stupid that is?
You think 90% of TVs don't use Roku, webOS, Android, or Apple?
No different than exposing any other port service, like Plex for example. However it's my reverse proxy.
That's the arguably part. The argument.
So...
What is the argument for jellyfin? It's basically the exact same thing without the relay servers or no-setup remote streaming and sharing.
Remote access is the single area where Plex is better. Even then, it's not that you can't do it with Jellyfin; it's just harder to set up.
Everything about Jellyfin is free. This includes hardware transcoding, which is subscription based on Plex.
The Jellyfin apps are also much better than they used to be. I'd say easily on par with Plex now (the native Jellyfin client and the music app, finamp).
To me, it seems like a really hard sell when Jellyfin effectively does everything that the paid service does for free.
Saying things like this is laughable. JellyFin is basically temu plex, better at pretty much nothing other than being open source. At best it matches it in some ways, at worst it is significantly worse and lacking features.
If the server owner has a lifetime pass, theres no subscription fee needed by anyone. Hardware transcoding on Plex is also significantly better than on JellyFin.
But still trash compared to plex.
Again, apart from easy and secure remote streaming.
I do think it's weird that Plex decided to put hardware transcoding behind a paid membership, so that's obviously a negative, but it sounds like the argument for jellyfin is that it's free but you get less. That's ok, I'm not dragging jellyfin through the mud on this, but you have to admit many people think their Plex purchase is worth it compared to jellyfin.
As I said, I don't think it's worth it. And that's OK -- we can disagree.