I stopped scrolling through my Plex library for hours after finding this open-source recommendation app

Published Aug 31, 2026, 3:30 PM EDT Dhruv Bhutani has been writing about consumer technology since 2008, offering deep insights into the personal technology landscape through features and opinion pieces. He writes for XDA-Developers, where he focuses on topics like productivity, networking, self-hosting, and more. Over the years, his work has also appeared in leading publications such as Android Police, Android Authority, CNET, PCMag, and more. Outside of his professional work, Dhruv is an avid fan of horror media spanning films and literature, enjoys fitness activities, collects vinyl records, and plays the guitar. To say that my Plex library runs large would be an understatement. It's so large that, at this point, it's hard for me to find something to watch on my personal Netflix server. The problem is that Plex doesn't do a particularly good job of helping me discover the right kind of content that I want to watch. You know, Netflix-style recommendations that tell me that if I liked something, I'll probably like another movie of the same kind. This open-source app attempts to bridge that gap. Dubbed Shortlist, the app reads my Plex watch history and builds a fully customized row full of movies and shows picked from my own library that I haven't watched yet. But not just that, it fully tweaks these lists based on content that I've been watching recently, solving a problem that I keep running into. The fact that I have plenty to watch, but I don't know what to watch. Shortlist builds recommendations around what I am currently watching The app uses your Plex history to find unwatched, relevant content Shortlist is built around a singular feature, which is to give you better recommendations. To that end, it looks at what you've watched, uses those titles to find similar movies and shows, then filters the content to show only what you have in your Plex library. It also filters out content you've already seen so you always get fresh recommendations. The recommendation sources are fully configurable. In fact, you have to give the app a TMDB API key during the onboarding process. You can also add extra sources. For example, Shortlist can pull data from Trakt and even web searches. I haven't gone that far down the rabbit hole yet, but if you want, you can pair it with LLMs like Google Gemini or ChatGPT for more granular recommendations. The local LLM route is supported too, but you don't need AI to use Shortlist. For example, I use it completely without any AI dependence. Movie recommendations are more or less a solved problem because of the abundance of databases, so I'm glad I can use the app without AI. Elsewhere, Shortlist is smart enough to group entire TV shows as a single source of truth for building recommendations. That's a much smarter way to handle things than using individual episodes for recommendations. Personalized recommendations for every user Expand your library further with Radarr and Sonarr integration Credit: My favorite aspect of Shortlist is the fact that you don't need to run it on the same server where Plex is hosted. As someone who runs multiple Plex servers, including one hosted on a VPS, I can connect to all of these instances through a single Plex sign-in. You can also select which accounts you want exposed to the app. This makes it infinitely useful for multi-user households since Shortlist gives personalized recommendations for each user instead of blanketing all users with the same recommendations. In my time testing out the app, I found the recommendations to be on point. While the app can't get around the limitations of a limited library, it does a good enough job within that scope. I watch a lot of horror content, and when I was on a folk horror binge, Shortlist did a great job of surfacing undiscovered gems from my own library. But if you're okay to give the app a bit more control, it can also tap into Radarr and Sonarr. With this enabled, you can ask Shortlist to recommend content that isn't in your library yet. Moreover, it can trigger the acquisition of said content. Now, I'll be honest: I didn't test this because most of my library is ripped from Blu-rays and DVDs. However, if you want to expand your movie collection, this could be a nifty way to branch out into unexplored movies right in your interest zone. Circling back to the recommendations, Shortlist offers a few different options. The default is the personalized shelf, which ended up being my favorite. But you can also ask Shortlist to create rows based on a specific title that you've watched. You can further customize how often these rows update as well. I opted for the 12-hour refresh cycle to avoid putting too much strain on the server. Shortlist makes it easy to discover Plex media If Plex is your mainstay for media consumption, Shortlist is an excellent addition to the media stack. It makes your existing movie library more useful by surfacing media you might have forgotten. Instead of scrolling through hundreds or thousands of titles, Shortlist can present content based on your current interests. If you so choose, you can even have it expand your library further by tapping into your existing stack, but that's not essential. For me, just the ability to find media in my library that I'd totally forgotten about makes it a great fit for any Plex-based media stack. Shortlist Shortlist is an open-source app that generates movie recommendations based on your Plex watch history and filters them based on availability in your personal library.