Selfhosted

There are a LOT of pros and cons.

Pros:

• Developed by a professional, multi-disciplined full-time team with some security oversight.
• Hosted caching of The Movie DB for faster lookups
• Provision of SSL communication to and from your server without any special setup
• FREE EPG data caching
• Centralized server management from the web
• Low-speed relay for those stuck behind CGNAT.
• A REALLY solid mobile audio*** player (sorry, but plexamp beats the pants off the JF alternatives)
• Centralized Login for your friends and family with email-based password reset
• 2FA already set up
• A nice reflector gauge to see if your* ports are open and what your limits are
• Great client support on a LOT of devices
• Search is fast out of the box, even with extensive collections
• Their clients tend to do a better job supporting all the decoding features on every player
• Very reasonable Tuner support (but somewhat ugly) **

Cons:

• Not free
• Not Open
• They have a lot of your historical data and will eventually sell it when they sell the company. This is not going to be optional. That data is worth a lot and they likely already have enough EULA rights to sell it to whoever asks. Imagine if the MPAA gets in on the fun.
• Their security history is quite dicey
• The lifetime membership will eventually be enshitified as it's not economically sound in the long run
• They constantly change the terms of the agreement.
• They constantly remove features people are using
• They constantly push to share data between users
• They constantly push Ads
• They are making previously free features pay.
• Their investors are starving, which makes them a liability.
• Their clients are generally slower.

edit: * a word ** forgot to shout out for the tuner support *** replaced media with audio for clarity

I am a die-hard Jellyfin user, but I still haven't found a proper way to index and stream my music library with it. As far as i know, Plex is still better at that.

I think it mostly comes down to sharing stuff with others.

There's a lot of stuff in Jellyfin you wouldn't want to expose to the internet.

No idea if Jellyfin even has a client for my dad's shonky old 4K TV, but I certainly wouldn't be able to set up Wireguard or anything on it.

Years ago, I tried out Jellyfin (Emby at the time) and it couldn't do chromecasting with subtitles (probably fixed by now, this was a long time ago). Since I wanted to watch anime, I bought a Plex lifetime subscription instead, and I'm too lazy to switch.

People commonly cite more polished clients and clients available on obscure platforms like legacy smart TVs and such

TV apps.

The lack of a PS5 app makes Jellyfin useless to me. We have a dumb TV with no casting ability so the PlayStation is out media box.

End user management.

Essentially, accounts and passwords are not my problem.

They're going to sell the data to movie companies so they can find out what is being pirated

I fuckin guarantee it.

Trakt did the same thing I bet

It just works and has a native app for basically everything.

Sunk cost. It took me loosing my Plex watch history to say fuck it I'm going to Jellyfin.

Because Plex used to be good but new it's just pure enshitification.

User sharing without opening my Plex server to the public internet. For Jellyfin I would have to become a VPN provider and allow people into my private network to share it safely, since you wouldn't want to have Jellyfin available to the internet with their stance on security

Because Jellyfin et al are all still very much "open source projects" in terms of UI/UX and it is still "missing" so many features.

For me? The big reasons why I just use plex boil down to:

1. Maybe 80% of the time, I can cache an episode or a movie locally on my tablet when I am going on travel. This is great if I am doing a rewatch of something or don't super care about The Experience and just want to watch the next few episodes of a show in the evening. With Plex, this is trivial. With SOME of the third party jellyfin apps, this can be sort of worked around but then becomes a hassle to sync watch statistics (which episodes were watched or even where I left off because a buddy wanted to go out for drinks).
2. Remote watching is similarly a mess. Plex has pretty okay-good systems to treat my home server as a "cloud" resource with a single forwarded port. While even that is very questionable security wise, Jellyfin is still "figure it out yourself". Which can be done with setting up a vpn or using Tailscale but adds additional complexities.
3. Plenty of other "quirks" along similar lines

My personal opinion? For something that only "tech savvy" people are using more or less locally, Jellyfin is fine. For something that "just works"? There is no competition with Plex. And considering how many of the Jellyfin workarounds end up being "just download a copy of the file locally and watch it in VLC"... why would I use Jellyfin at all in that case when I could otherwise just mount a samba share or use Kodi (that is the latest incarnation of XBMC or whatever the samba share frontend we all used to watch porn on our playstations was, right?).

To be clear. I check in on Jellyfin probably every other year at this point? I WANT an alternative to Plex. But... Jellyfin ain't it.

I’ve been a Plex user. Honestly it was mostly because I chose Plex years ago before a lot of the recent controversy. Plex always seemed like it had a nicer interface, though I never really gave Jellyfin a try. As of late, Plex has started to add a lot of bloat to their interface, so at this point Jellyfin’s UI might actually be a pro.

I've tried Jellyfin and the Live TV / tuner interface sucked so bad I didn't want to bother with it any further. Maybe I could have found plugins or some shit to make it more usable but I've had a lifetime Plex pass for almost a decade and it still works great

Yes, they've made a number of decisions that truly suck in that time but it's still better than the experience I had with Jellyfin or Emby, even recently.