Right after I got my first NAS, I was excited to turn it into a media streaming hub. And for me, the only tool I knew of that could make this happen was Plex. It was the default for everyone, and rightly so. It continues to be one of the most feature-rich media platforms out there.

But once you spend several months with Plex, you start to notice a lot of its restrictions that quickly become an inconvenience. That’s when I switched to Jellyfin — a more open alternative to Plex — and it’s been relieving. Here’s what I learned after switching from Plex to Jellyfin.

6 Free as in control

Not just money

Plex and Jellyfin follow different paid models — the former is a freemium product while the latter is fully free and open source. More than the pricing difference, the kind of control and privacy that Jellyfin’s open-source nature brings to the table is unmatched. It doesn’t send out my personal logs or stats to an external server. More importantly, I didn’t need to create an account to start using it.

It’s something that people are surprised by, too. My family was intrigued that they didn’t need to create an account. Jellyfin brings the control back to me. I own both the server and the service, without anyone seeking control over it — and that’s deeply satisfying.

5 The setup isn’t plug-and-play

It needs your full attention

Plex spoils you with simplicity. It’s dead easy to set up, especially with the guided setup process. You install it on your server, point it to your media folder, and everything is ready to go within minutes. While certainly not hard, Jellyfin requires you to be more involved in the process.

For starters, I had to install Jellyfin via Docker on my NAS, which itself requires a bit of work. That also means managing permissions so that the container has the required media folder access and hardware acceleration. However, once everything was ready, it was all mine! The setup was quite fast, and I knew my way around if something broke.

4 Metadata management is a task

To put it lightly

Plex is far more forgiving when it comes to messy file names. You could’ve made typos, and it would still pick up the correct details for your movie or TV series. Jellyfin requires a bit more work with how the files are named and nested inside folders.

Jellyfin expects you to follow a clean file naming format that it can read, particularly for TV shows. So, while Plex can accurately label Breaking Bad S2 Ep01.mp4 in a file dump, Jellyfin would ask you to put it in a nested folder: Breaking Bad/Season 2/Breaking Bad S02E01.mp4.

Having to rename everything became tedious after a point, but at least Jellyfin lets you plug in custom scrapers or do manual edits — something Plex hides behind a paywall.

3 Client support is dicey

But you’ve got plenty of workarounds

Jellyfin has official apps for all mainstream platforms, including TV operating systems, but given its nature, its quality isn’t always as good as Plex's across the board. There’s a chance you will come across something failing to work or live up to your expectations. It happened to me when loading took a few extra seconds on Fire TV, and on Android when quick scrubbing didn’t show a preview thumbnail.

That said, once the playback starts, it’s always solid. And if you are adventurous enough, you can experiment with third-party clients, which can get you the extra features Plex makes you pay for.

2 Local streaming feels snappier

I thought Plex was fast

I didn’t know what snappy felt like until I switched to Jellyfin. Plex had optimized local streaming pretty well — at least that’s what I considered until then. Once I moved over to Jellyfin, I saw exactly the thing I was missing. Initial loads were minimal (except for client issues on some platforms), and I didn’t experience buffering unless something was seriously wrong with my NAS or network.

Plex would sometimes resort to transcoding even when it didn’t need to — I got to know when I heard the NAS fans start spinning loudly. All these little things do add up to make the experience that much better.

1 No more premium paywalls

That frustration is gone entirely

Plex Pass started to feel more and more limiting, and those labels against premium features and persistent reminders that I must pay a subscription fee to use those features were getting frustrating by the day. It goes against the very idea of running your own server for media streaming.

Jellyfin, on the other hand, is entirely free. So, it doesn’t try to put features behind subscriptions, nor does it nudge you every single moment it gets to remind you to pay. That’s unsurprisingly liberating. An app that isn’t trying to extract money from me but instead lets me enjoy my collection? Jellyfin gets my vote!

Jellyfin is built for the tinkerers

While Plex is for those who want a no-nonsense media streaming platform, Jellyfin is for people who want to take control. And if you really go down the rabbit hole, you will find endless use out of it. You can not only stream video and audio content — you can use plugins to even watch YouTube videos using Jellyfin. That is just one of the many ways you can put this free and open-source app to use.