These are truly the only competition in existence. Jellyfin is something I plan on testing soon however, and maybe you should too! However, Jellyfin as well as Emby (which Jellyfin is based on) share a lot of common complaints with bugs in the app to plain sluggishness. Development is still active on this project and it offers features that the free versions of Emby and Plex do not offer, such as Live TV DVR. Jellyfinīeing that Emby was one fully open source, some developers created a fork of Emby some time ago to include the premium features that were previously locked behind Emby's premium service🤷‍♂️. Though, some of the features such as access to podcasts or the ability to stream to a TV, are features that are free on Plex already. Emby also has its own premium subscription that is on par price-wise as Plex. The biggest competitor to Plex is also open source. I would make the argument that the premium version of Plex, Plex Pass, is generally not needed by the large majority of users.īut for the sake of argument and awareness, let's take a quick look at Plex some modern alternatives you may want to consider. Plex offers quite a bit out of the box completely for free and it continuously gets better over time, with many of the features that once required 'Plex Pass' eventually making their way into the free version. You do need to spend $5 to access the Plex mobile app if you intend to watch from your phone or tablet (Unless you have Plex Pass), and Plex is not open-source. There are a lot of alternative streaming servers out there you could choose besides Plex, you may even prefer them but I have found Plex to be the best overall, with the most features. You can even share your content with as many people as you like, assuming your home server and bandwidth can handle it.

This incredibly easy to use software allows you to simply connect hard drives full of movies, tv shows, and music and then organize and display it in your web browser or from an app anywhere, including smart TVs. Plex Media Server is a media organization and streaming server software you can install on any operating system. Plex is not Netflix, but it's pretty darn similar. If you are new to home media servers, take a chance to see quickly why we are choosing Plex. If you are familiar with Plex, you can skip down below where we get started with the install. Creating your own home media server is easy, fun, and a great learning exercise. For those looking to get into hosting your own content at home, there is no better place to get started. I have been a user of Plex Media Server for the past 3 years and I haven't looked back since.

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