In the rush from Plex to Jellyfin, everyone forgot the media server that sits right in the middle

Published Jul 23, 2026, 3:00 PM EDT Samir Makwana is a technology journalist and editor from India since past 18 years and his work appears on MakeUseOf, HowToGeek, GSMArena, BGR, GuidingTech, The Inquisitr, TechInAsia, TechWiser, and others. He has written news, features, and gadget reviews for national technology media publications. His passion is to help people with their technology problems and gadget purchases. For that, he has worked for some of the biggest international technology publications, covering news, explainers, how-to guides, listicles, and product-buying guides. He has worked as an editor and managed teams since 2015. His expertise broadly covers computers, smartphones, game consoles, headphones, smart home products, browsers, and apps. I’ll be honest: the Plex vs Jellyfin debate has been beaten to death. I have even added to the pile more than once. Amid the tug of war between Plex and Jellyfin, Emby always gets a mention as a compromise pick. After that, it gets nudged off with a mention of its Premiere paywall. I have written about the Premiere paywall as well. I’ve been using Emby for over a month, and I realized that Emby does a bunch of things differently once I get past the login screen. It’s the kind of stuff that doesn’t get mentioned in a bullet point comparison table. Emby packs a handful of features buried in its dashboard. They address problems that no one expects a media server to solve at all. Emby’s user profiles handle parental controls properly PINs and ratings don’t require a subscription Sharing the same media library with family is fine, but you don’t want everyone to access every kind of content. That’s why Emby lets you set PINs and rating limits on individual user profiles. It goes a step further to let you choose the list of libraries that a particular user can see. This lets you hide an entire library instead of hiding content individually. So there’s no folder icon tempting a curious kid to poke around. ​ You can pair a kid's profile with a ratings limit to ensure it shows nothing above PG-13. You can hide libraries tagged with true-crime and horror, and add a PIN, so the profile can’t be switched easily. With a Plex Pass subscription, you get more granular options, like restricting a profile by a specific content rating or a custom label. Meanwhile, Emby lets you do that without any subscription. Nobody mentions the photos and home video library Turning a folder of family memories into an actual library Emby handles two distinct media types: photos and home videos. My home server already runs an Immich instance, so I wasn’t too keen on trying it out initially. When I did, I learned that Emby treats the collection as a separate library type. It doesn’t get crammed into a movies or TV shows folder. Emby reads existing EXIF data to extract metadata like size, camera, date taken, and geotags. That metadata is used to organize photos automatically. Emby even serves the collection as a slideshow. Since the feature is free, you can simply map a folder containing photos and home videos. The feature turned out to be convenient for consolidating family pictures that are scattered across old phone backups. Sure, it’s not a replacement for a dedicated photo manager for anyone who wants to tag and create albums. It’s useful to browse the family photos and videos from the couch without running a separate instance. Jellyfin does offer a photo and home video library feature, but doesn’t read EXIF data like Emby. Jellyfin iOS compatible Yes Android compatible Yes Desktop compatible Yes Emby quietly doubles as a Kodi library sync Two different front ends backed by one media server The official free Emby for Kodi add-on syncs the media libraries, metadata, and watch status directly into Kodi. That’s how Kodi works as a front end, with Emby acting as a back end. Your library data, playback position, and ratings stay synced between the interfaces. So your household can pick either Kodi or Emby and still continue watching content from either interface. This turned out well for my mismatched household setup. You can install LibreELEC on a Raspberry Pi to get the Kodi interface and connect it to an old dumb TV. With that, you don’t need to run and maintain two separate libraries. Kodi reads from Emby’s libraries. ​ Jellyfin covers the same ground with its own official Kodi add-on. Plex is still missing the official add-on, but you can use the unofficial PlexKodiConnect. You can back up and restore your server config quietly Premiere subscription is necessary On Emby, you can take a backup of your Emby server’s configuration, database, user profiles, watched history, and metadata. The Official Backup & Restore plugin lets you do that so you can reconfigure and rebuild your server in a matter of minutes. With the server config backup, you can quickly restore a familiar Emby setup. You’ll need an Emby Premiere subscription, which is currently $4.99 a month, $54 a year, or $119 for a lifetime license. Set the backup schedule with the help of the plugin, and Emby takes care of the rest. It’s the kind of feature you don’t think about until that one day you need it for your Emby server setup. Since Emby’s backup only covers server config, you’ll need to back up your media libraries separately. However, Emby has an interesting solution for that as well. For the media, the Folder Sync plugin lets you take a transcoded backup of your media files for efficiency and storage savings. This feature is also part of the Premiere subscription. Apart from that, Emby serves those toned-down versions to devices that would otherwise need the original file transcoded on the fly. That’s how it’s sparing your server’s CPU resources. OS Windows, macOS, Linux Individual pricing Free, $6.99/month, $250/lifetime Emby still comes up short as a middle child No SyncPlay equivalent and delayed metadata sync Despite the benefits, Emby isn’t exactly flawless and still lags in a few aspects. For starters, it lacks Jellyfin’s SyncPlay feature that lets you group-watch something natively. On Jellyfin, any user can create or join a synced viewing room. Plex had a similar feature called Watch Together, but it was stripped out in early 2025. The feature is only available through its web app. In comparison, Emby offers no such feature directly, while third-party clients integrate a group-watching feature. Unfortunately, none of them are reliable enough to actually recommend. There’s a clear delay in the metadata and watch-state sync across devices with Emby. That’s surprising for a media server that’s been around for a while. When you mark something as watched in one Emby client, it takes a refresh or two to appear in other places. That’s a minor annoyance, and not exactly a deal-breaker. It’s a rough edge that holds back Emby from feeling fully polished. Emby does unglamorous things well to earn its spot None of these features show up on a headline comparison chart, and that’s exactly why they get ignored. Parental controls, photo library, and Kodi bridge are free, built-in features with no Emby Premiere subscription necessary. Jellyfin matches most of that, feature-for-feature, backup included. So Premiere doesn’t buy you a capability that you can get elsewhere. What you get is official backup tooling instead of a cron job, and one team to call when something breaks. It’s a smaller trade than the transcoding-paywall debate usually makes it sound. That’s why Emby is still running as my media server. Emby