- Plex began as a personal home media server tool but has shifted toward becoming an ad-supported streaming service, burying personal media under commercial content.
- Centralized authentication through Plex.tv creates a single point of failure, leading to lockouts during outages and raising data privacy concerns.
- Plex's feature development has been mixed: mobile downloads improved, but features like Watch Together were deprecated in favor of commercial-focused additions.
- Jellyfin offers a fully open-source, local alternative with no central accounts, no tracking, and free hardware transcoding, but its client apps are less polished and fragmented.
- Open-source projects like Jellyfin face challenges like maintainer burnout, unrealistic user expectations, and low-quality PRs; community support is crucial for their survival.
- Long-time users may still benefit from Plex's lifetime pass, especially with Plexamp saving on music subscriptions, but the recent price hike to $750 makes it hard to recommend for newcomers.
- A pragmatic approach is to start with Jellyfin today or run both Plex and Jellyfin in parallel to gradually transition as Jellyfin matures.
- Commercial pressures, subscription fatigue, and corporate 'enshittification' drive users toward open-source alternatives, but sustainable support is needed for these communities.