What am I missing?

After 3 Years of Running Plex, Emby, and Jellyfin, What Am I Missing?

Has anyone else really tried to make Jellyfin their main server and walked away feeling like the actual end user experience still isn’t close to Plex or Emby?

I really do want Jellyfin to win. That’s the annoying part.

Look, I loathe what Plex has turned into like most of you, and I only slightly less loathe Emby’s ridiculous Premier license setup. But I already have lifetime for both, so for me this Jellyfin journey has mostly just been a lot of wasted hours.

I’ve been running Plex since 2013, and I’ve been running Plex, Emby, and Jellyfin concurrently for the last 3 years so I could actually test them side by side.

This isn’t a basic setup. I’m at around 100TB of media, thousands of movies and shows, multiple servers and clients, custom collections, discovery integrations, reverse proxy access, NVIDIA transcoding, Quick Sync available, and years invested in trying to optimize the experience.

The problem is that Jellyfin is “customizable” in the same way an unfinished kit car is customizable. Sure, you can bolt a bunch of stuff onto it, but that doesn’t mean you end up with something normal people want to drive.

Most of the good stuff only really works in the web UI. That’s fine if you’re one person watching in a browser. That’s not how my household or family actually watches media. They use Apple TV, TV apps, tablets, and living room devices. That’s where the whole thing starts falling apart.

Discovery is honestly trash compared to Plex or Emby. Getting clean discovery rows on the actual homepage where people expect to find them is one of the biggest frustrations I’ve had with Jellyfin.

Plex handles this with smart collections and a mature ecosystem. Emby now supports much of it directly. In Jellyfin, the answer always seems to involve another plugin, another script, another client, or another workaround. After hours of setup, you often find out the feature only works in a browser, only works on certain clients, or doesn’t actually show up on the device your users are watching from.

A recent example was Moonfin with custom home sections driven by collections. On Apple TV, I could see and select the sections I wanted to expose. Great, right? Except they never actually showed up on the Apple TV home screen. In the web UI and on iPad, parts of it worked. On the device where I actually needed it to work, it didn’t.

That basically sums up my entire Jellyfin experience.

Every time I hit a limitation, the answer is some version of install this plugin, install these dependencies, run this script, use this alternate client, clear your cache, edit this config, try this fork, oh that only works in web, oh that doesn’t work on Apple TV yet.

At some point I started wondering whether all of these community apps, plugins, scripts, themes, and integrations are actually more harm than good for people who want a polished media experience. They make Jellyfin look like it can do everything, but in practice they send you into hours of experimenting just to end up with a worse experience and less functionality than Plex or Emby already give you.

Honestly, Jellyfin feels like it’s best for two groups of people.

People with very basic needs who are happy with the core functionality.

And the tin foil hat self-hosting crowd who want zero dependency on company apps and are willing to spend endless hours tinkering just to avoid Plex or Emby.

If you’re in the middle, where you want privacy and control but also want a polished family-friendly experience across actual devices people use, Jellyfin feels like a bad tradeoff.

I get the appeal. Open source, no licenses, no vendor lock-in, full control. Those are real advantages.

But if someone asked me what I’d recommend for a household media server that just works well across multiple devices, I couldn’t recommend Jellyfin over Plex or Emby right now.

I still like Jellyfin and I still want it to succeed. But after spending way too much time trying to recreate discovery, home screen rows, recommendations, collections, and general polish that Plex and Emby handle with a fraction of the effort, I’m left feeling like Jellyfin is a decent media server, but not a great media platform, at least not for my needs, my library size, and the types of end users I have.

Has anyone else had the same experience, or am I missing something obvious?