Jellyfin's core team just walked out, and I'm still not going back to Plex

Published Aug 4, 2026, 11:30 AM EDT Jeff's been involved in the IT industry since before the Internet and spent more than 20 years working in technical support, system administration, network administration, and consulting roles. He holds an undergraduate degree in English, a Master's degree in English with a focus on professional writing and editing, and another Master's degree in Computing & Information Systems. After teaching university English and computer science for a few years, Jeff launched his writing career. He's written for Macworld, Tom's Hardware, groovyPost, The Mac Observer, and more before beginning here at XDA. I've recommended Jellyfin many times to friends or clients who are getting fed up with Plex. It's usually an easy recommendation because the pitch isn't complicated: run your own server, keep control of it, and stop worrying about which feature Plex might put behind another subscription next. That makes Jellyfin's current leadership mess pretty uncomfortable to watch. Three prominent members of the project left within days of one another in July 2026, including project leader Joshua Boniface, core team member Anthony Lavado, and Andrew Rabert, who had been responsible for desktop applications. Even with all of that hanging over Jellyfin, I still can't see myself recommending Plex instead. The departures look worse than the situation actually is Losing familiar names doesn't mean Jellyfin stopped being developed There's no point trying to make three departures in a few days sound routine. Boniface wasn't just another name buried somewhere in Jellyfin's contributor list. He'd led the project since its beginnings as an Emby fork and had become one of the people most closely associated with it. With Lavado and Rabert leaving around the same time, my first thought was the obvious one: how much of Jellyfin just walked out the door? That question becomes a little less alarming once you get past the names and look at what Boniface actually said about his role. He described himself more as a philosophical guide and people manager than as Jellyfin's primary programmer, and said the people responsible for most of the actual development work over the past several years are still there. I want to stress something important here, borne out of Jellyfin’s project structure: this is NOT a case of “lead developer leaves”. I barely wrote any code even early on, and was always more of a “philosophical guide”, “visionary” (think, though I detest the comparison personally, Steve Jobs), and people manager. This was something that was actually very unique to our project in comparison to just about every other FLOSS project; the vast majority are run and led by the #1 code contributor, usually the originator or someone who took up that role after a fork, but we were not. At least not up until now. The same people who have actually been doing the work for the last several years are still with the project, including the remaining Core team and many many others who’s names would fill a full paragraph, and they are the ones now working on deciding on how it will be led going forward. Not only are they the real drivers of Jellyfin, but I trust these folks with the philosophy and goals of the project, and believe they will continue to do good work under the Jellyfin name, keeping things FLOSS and non-monetized, and guiding the project down the same path it was always heading. “New boss, same as the old boss”, but in a good way. That's not a minor distinction when you're wondering whether your media server has suddenly become a dead-end project. Losing experienced leadership hurts, but it isn't the same as losing the developers maintaining the server, web interface, and clients I actually use. The project hasn't frozen while everyone figures out whose name goes at the top of the org chart, either. Jellyfin 12.0 RC3 arrived after Boniface resigned, and work on the release continued as the remaining team dealt with the transition. In fact, RC4 arrived on August 2, 2026. So it's clear there had already been active work across Jellyfin's server and clients before the resignations landed. I wouldn't call that proof that everything is fine, because it isn't, but it's also nowhere near the abandoned-project scenario I was worried about when I first saw the news. Open source gives Jellyfin an escape route Plex lacks The project can change leaders without changing who owns it The biggest reason I'm not preparing to move my library is the same reason Jellyfin is so easy for me to recommend in the first place. It isn't a service where a leadership change automatically makes me wonder what the new product strategy will do to my server. Jellyfin is free and open-source software built by volunteers, without a premium tier sitting between me and a useful feature I might need six months from now. I've used enough open-source software to know that arrangement can create its own annoyances, but I'll take those annoyances over wondering which part of my existing setup is about to become a paid upgrade. The leadership can also change without changing who ultimately controls Jellyfin. Boniface's resignation kicked off the succession process laid out in the project's constitution rather than giving one person the ability to sell it, completely redirect it, or decide the project needs to start generating recurring revenue. He also said he expects Jellyfin to remain free, open source, and non-monetized under the remaining team. That's not a binding promise about Jellyfin's future, and I'm not treating it as one, but the structure gives me more confidence than a corporate roadmap ever would. That starts to matter a lot more after you've spent time building a media library around the thing. I don't want to organize everything, manage users, sort out how everyone accesses it, and then discover that something I've been using for years now requires another subscription. Jellyfin can frustrate me in other ways. It has enough rough edges that I'd never pretend otherwise. What it hasn't done is make me feel as though the server on my own network is gradually turning into somebody else's service. Plex keeps giving me reasons not to return Recent Plex changes make Jellyfin's uncertainty easier to accept The obvious response to all this Jellyfin turmoil is that Plex is right there. That's true, and Plex has spent years being the more polished option in many areas. The problem is that it keeps making changes that remind me exactly why I recommend Jellyfin when someone tells me they're tired of dealing with it. Remote streaming of personal video was moved behind Plex Pass or a Remote Watch Pass on affected platforms, and that requirement eventually expanded to smart TVs and consoles in 2026. I'm not against paying developers for software, so the fact that Plex charges money isn't really the point. The sticking point is paying Plex so I can remotely stream a video file stored on hardware I bought, maintain, power, and connect to the internet myself. That's the sort of restriction that's hard to forget once it bothers you. Jellyfin asking me to put up with an occasional rough edge doesn't somehow make that model more appealing again. The Lifetime Plex Pass price makes the comparison even harder to ignore. It increased to $750 for new buyers in July 2026 after already climbing to $250 the previous year. Existing lifetime users keep what they already bought, so someone who purchased a pass years ago is in a very different position. But if I'm talking to someone setting up a media server today, recommending that they spend $750 to permanently unlock Plex is a much tougher conversation than it used to be. There are good reasons to worry about Jellyfin Volunteer projects can struggle when experienced leadership leaves together None of that lets Jellyfin off the hook for what just happened. The project has acknowledged before that its active contributor pool isn't enormous, noting in 2023 that roughly 30 people were contributing across the server, web interface, and clients. Spread those people across everything Jellyfin has to maintain, and the number starts to look pretty small. A few departures can matter a lot more when there isn't a huge engineering department waiting in the wings. Jellyfin’s leadership shakeup doesn’t mean development has stopped. The people responsible for much of the recent server, web, and client work are still involved, and development on Jellyfin 12.0 continued after the resignations. There's also a whole category of project work I don't see when I install an update. Somebody has to settle disagreements, decide which work gets priority, coordinate releases, keep policies current, and handle the administrative chores that make development possible in the first place. Boniface talked about that burden when he explained why he was stepping away. He wasn't writing most of Jellyfin's code, but after reading his explanation, I came away thinking his absence might be felt in less obvious places first. And there really isn't a guarantee this stops with three people. Priorities could change under new leadership. Other developers could decide this is a good time to leave too, and components that only have one or two people maintaining them could start slowing down. That's the part I'm going to watch much more closely than the initial drama, because I'll learn more about Jellyfin's health from what happens over the next several months than from one very bad week. Jellyfin doesn't need certainty to remain my choice Plex would have to solve problems Jellyfin hasn't created I don't need Jellyfin to promise me another eight years of development before I'm willing to keep using it. Nobody can make that promise about a software project, and it would be especially silly to expect it from one maintained largely by volunteers. What I care about is whether these departures changed the reasons I use and recommend Jellyfin. Right now, I can't point to anything that says they have. My Jellyfin server still runs on my NAS, serves the media I put there, and doesn't ask me to pay another company before I can access that library remotely. I can choose different clients depending on what works best rather than treating one company's application as the required front end for everything. More importantly, nobody involved in this leadership transition suddenly gained control over the server in my house. I did, and that's still the part of this setup I value most. There are things that could change my mind. If development stalls, important clients start disappearing, security maintenance becomes unreliable, or the remaining team pushes Jellyfin away from the principles that made me choose it, I'll start looking seriously at what comes next. Those are concrete failures that would affect the software I'm actually running. Three prominent people resigning gets my attention, but it isn't enough by itself to make me dismantle a setup that continues to do what I need it to do. I'm watching Jellyfin closely, but I'm staying put Jellyfin's leadership shakeup deserves attention because volunteer projects can lose momentum when experienced people leave. I'll be watching Jellyfin 12.0, the person who eventually takes over the leadership role, and whether development still feels healthy once the immediate disruption is behind the project. I wouldn't tell someone looking at Jellyfin today to ignore what happened. I would tell them there's a pretty big gap between "the project has a leadership problem" and "the software is dying." Plex remains the safer bet if organizational stability is the only thing I'm measuring, because there's a company behind it rather than a volunteer team trying to keep a sprawling open-source project moving. But that company also makes the decisions that pushed me toward Jellyfin and keep pushing other frustrated Plex users in the same direction. Jellyfin asks me to accept more rough edges and a little more uncertainty in exchange for keeping control of my media server where I want it. The core team walking out is enough to make me watch Jellyfin much more carefully, but it still isn't enough to make Plex look like the better deal. Jellyfin iOS compatible Yes Android compatible Yes Desktop compatible Yes Despite the recent leadership exodus, I still stand by Jellyfin as my media server of choice.