3 reasons Emby is a great alternative to Plex and Jellyfin

Emby is a popular choice for those who have plenty of owned media content they wish to catalog, store digitally, and stream to various devices. Like Plex and Jellyfin, Emby can arrange all of your movies, shows, and music into playlists, collections, and folders, and allows anyone with access to stream and enjoy their favorite media. When choosing between the three popular media streaming platforms, you’ll wonder what makes Emby worth choosing over the competition. There are a handful of reasons Emby may be the better choice, though Plex, Emby, and Jellyfin are all solid offerings in their own right.

1 Everything works

Out of the box? You bet!

Once Emby is installed, it’s ready to go! Load all your media files onto the server and it will start cataloging everything. The software is optimized and runs well on most hardware configurations, meaning you shouldn’t expect such processes to take too long. There’s nothing additional to install, everything is ready from the get-go. And you can install Emby on just about anything, even a Raspberry Pi. The user interface is much easier to parse for newcomers than Plex and other offerings. As software evolves over time and has additional features baked in, it becomes difficult to keep the UI beginner-friendly. Emby nails it.

2 Better value for its paid upgrade

Optional but worth it for power users

Plex Pass is entirely optional but it’s not the most feature-rich upgrade. That’s where Emby shines with its Premiere subscription. Like Plex, Emby offers a monthly payment plan or a single lifetime purchase. Included with Emby Premiere is offline media support for storing content on clients, DVR for scheduling and series recording, full access to the official mobile apps and clients, hardware transcoding, cinema intros, automatic file conversion, cover art, backup and restore functionality, and integration with smart home services. It’s quite the upgrade but remains optional.

3 Excellent plugin support

There’s one for (almost) anything

Plex has essentially dropped plugins, though luckily, Emby and Jellyfin still offer a catalog of add-ons that can be installed to add extra functionality to your media server. Depending on what else you’d like your media center to handle, there are various plugins for Emby to expand its feature set. There are options for streaming content from various sources, handling media data, content features, and rilling trailers and other videos to recreate that cinema experience. You can even install a plug-in to view security camera feeds within Emby!

There’s no wrong choice

Whichever media streaming platform works best for you is the one you should rely on for many years to come. Emby isn’t the best media streaming platform and many of us here at XDA use Plex, Jellyfin, or some other media platform, but it’s still worth considering as each offers a different baseline feature set. The user interfaces also differ, so giving each a try is the best way to decide to load the best app for your server and needs.