Why is Jellyfin so much more popular than Emby?

[Nabukodonosor 15]

I mean, I was watching a video the other day about the new Plex lifetime price increase and in the comments you could see people recommending other self-hosted services to be used. 98 out of 100 people recommended Jellyfin. I mean, Jellyfin is an Emby fork...how come it gained such a traction and Emby is stuck at the bottom?

 

[yocker 1560]

Two words..

It's free!

[Nabukodonosor 15]

Come on. Emby is practicaly free too.

[howllor 32]

Yeah i think the fact that its fully free and open source is probably the reason. I keep being quite unimpressed with their apps, generally unpolished, and it's actually harder to navigate than emby IMHO. I keep going back and trying Jellyfin once in a while, but the settings pages and admin pages and everything is just like, not near enough? If that makes sense. Several of my users rely on the web apps, and they'd have a hard time using the default jellyfin

But yeh the argument I see the most about why someone should pick emby is "why pay for premium for something you get for free with Jellyfin", plus general suspicion about it not being open source, there's people being like "you never know, they might start enshittifying it and going the Plex route at any point"

Edited 10 hours ago by howllor

[yocker 1560]

10 minutes ago, Nabukodonosor said:

Come on. Emby is practicaly free too.

119$ is still a lot of money for most.
People will put up with a lot if it's free.

[Nabukodonosor 15]

I don't pay $119. I don't need Premiere. I paid couple of unlock licences for my devices and that's it.

[yocker 1560]

2 minutes ago, Nabukodonosor said:

I don't pay $119. I don't need Premiere. I paid couple of unlock licences for my devices and that's it.

That's still money that people can save if they use Jellyfin.
Fact of the matter is, Jellyfin is so popular because it's free and works. It might be much more rough and unpolished than Emby but it still works for what most people want and if it can be gotten for free then that's what most people will get.
 

[RanmaCanada 532]

Jellyfin is more popular as pirates hate to pay for stuff. Period. The fact it's open source means nothing. Jellyfin is extremely fragmented and still based on Luke's ancient code.

Remember, Jellyfin was created because someone didn't like the fact there was a nag screen to pay for an open source product. They created Emby Unlocked and went forward and forked what is now Jellyfin. 

It's an inferior product that works well enough that people are willing to put up with its issues as it costs them zero dollars, yet costs them time and frustration.

[SikSlayer 254]

2 hours ago, RanmaCanada said:

Jellyfin is more popular as pirates hate to pay for stuff. Period. The fact it's open source means nothing. Jellyfin is extremely fragmented and still based on Luke's ancient code.

Remember, Jellyfin was created because someone didn't like the fact there was a nag screen to pay for an open source product. They created Emby Unlocked and went forward and forked what is now Jellyfin. 

It's an inferior product that works well enough that people are willing to put up with its issues as it costs them zero dollars, yet costs them time and frustration.