Jellyfin exists because Emby decided to lock its next major release behind a paywall. In December 2018, a handful of frustrated Emby contributors forked the last fully open-source version of the project and built something nobody could take away from them again.
Note: this is the origin story, not a setup walkthrough. If you actually want to install Jellyfin, How to Set Up a Jellyfin Server covers the Docker, Windows, and NAS installs step by step, or see the Jellyfin app fiche for the quick facts (license, Docker image, alternatives).
Why Emby users started looking for a way out
Emby wasn’t originally called Emby. It started as Media Browser, an open-source plugin for Windows Media Center built by Luke Pulverenti, and got rebranded to Emby in 2015 as it grew into a standalone media server released under the GPLv2 license. For a few years it looked a lot like Jellyfin looks today: free, open, friendly toward outside contributors. That changed gradually rather than all at once. Emby added a paywall for some features in an early 3.x release, started pulling client and server code out of public view, and grew noticeably less receptive to community contributions. Several of the developers who’d later found Jellyfin, including Joshua Boniface, Andrew Rabert, and two contributors known as Vasily and dkanada, had already flagged what they considered GPL violations in how Emby was handling its licensing. Version 3.5.3, the release right after the one Jellyfin would eventually fork, dropped the open license entirely. So when Emby announced in December 2018 that its upcoming 4.x release would be closed source too, the reaction wasn’t really surprise. It was closer to “here we go.”
December 2018: 22 days from announcement to release
Emby’s closed-source announcement landed on December 8, 2018, and the group that would become the Jellyfin team moved fast. Within about a day, Andrew Rabert had proposed the name Jellyfin, and the team began forking every Emby repository they could legally grab before the door closed. They built from Emby’s last open release, version 3.5.2, and kept the GPLv2 license intact rather than looking for a workaround. The codebase was later ported to the .NET Core framework (now just .NET) specifically to make it properly cross-platform instead of Windows-first.
The first Jellyfin release shipped on December 30, 2018, just 22 days after the announcement, still labeled 3.5.2-5 under Emby’s old version numbers. Jellyfin’s own version numbering started with 10.0.0 on January 7, 2019, and that’s the point most people treat as the real starting line for the independent project.
From fork to full media server: the milestones that mattered
- 10.0.0 (January 2019): Jellyfin’s independent version numbering begins, the clean break from Emby’s codebase naming.
- 10.5.0 (March 2020): hardware-accelerated encoding and decoding added for the Raspberry Pi, a real win for a project popular with low-power home servers.
- 10.6.0 (July 2020): SyncPlay (watching together in sync across devices) and EPUB ebook support land, along with support for third-party plugin repositories.
- 10.8.0 (June 2022): full hardware-accelerated video filtering, scaling, deinterlacing, tone-mapping, and subtitle burn-in, across Intel, AMD, and Nvidia hardware.
- 10.10.0 (October 2024): Dolby Vision HDR support and media segment markers, chapter-style skip points, arrive.
Client apps grew the same way: slowly and unevenly. Community developers picked up Android, iOS, Apple TV, Fire TV, Roku, Kodi, and Xbox as separate projects, each on its own timeline, with no company coordinating a unified rollout. That’s part of why device support has always been a little patchier than Plex’s, something we get into in our Jellyfin vs Plex comparison.
No company, no investors: how Jellyfin is actually run
There’s no corporation behind Jellyfin. No venture funding, no shareholders to keep happy either. The project is run by a core team with merge access to the main repositories, around eight people currently, each with defined responsibilities beyond writing code. Joshua Boniface is the project leader, handling packaging, releases, finance, and infrastructure; others cover server development, the web client, plugins, and outreach.
Money comes through Open Collective, with the nonprofit Open Source Collective acting as fiscal host. In mid-2024, Boniface actually asked people to stop donating for a while. Jellyfin had over $24,000 in reserve against monthly costs of around $600, more than 40 months of runway, and he suggested people redirect donations to the individual developers building Jellyfin’s client apps instead. It’s a small anecdote, but it says something about how the project runs: lean, volunteer-driven, not chasing growth for its own sake.
Jellyfin, Emby, and Plex: the family tree
| Jellyfin | Emby | Plex | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Origin | Forked from Emby 3.5.2 in Dec. 2018 | Originally Media Browser, open source before 2018 | Independent project since 2007 |
| License | GPLv2, fully open source | Source-available, not fully open source | Proprietary, closed source |
| Governance | Volunteer core team, no company | Private company (Emby LLC) | Private company (Plex Inc.) |
| Hardware transcoding | Included for everyone | Behind Emby Premiere subscription | Behind Plex Pass subscription |
| Cost model | Free, always | Free tier plus paid Premiere tier | Free locally; remote access needs a paid Remote Watch Pass or Plex Pass |
For a deeper look at any single matchup, Jellyfin vs Emby and Jellyfin vs Plex both go further into pricing, apps, and day-to-day differences. Curious about Emby’s own path before the fork? The History of Emby covers how it went from a free Windows Media Center plugin to the company Jellyfin split from. Curious how Plex itself got started? The History of Plex covers its 2008 XBMC fork and the venture-funded path it took instead.
Where Jellyfin stands today
As of 2026, Jellyfin is still what it set out to be in December 2018: fully open source under GPLv2, run entirely by volunteers, with no paid tier hiding behind the free one. The main server repository on GitHub has passed 54,000 stars and 5,000 forks, with well over 100 tagged releases and a release cadence that generally lands a major version roughly every six months, with patch releases filling the gaps between.
Inside the self-hosted and homelab world, Jellyfin has settled into a specific role: the open-source media server people reach for once they’re done paying for software they’re already hosting themselves. It rarely runs alone. Most homelabs pair it with request managers like Jellyseerr so family members can ask for new content without touching the server directly, and it fits naturally into a wider self-hosted stack, the kind our Homelab Setup Guide for Beginners walks through from scratch.
FAQ
Who created Jellyfin?
A group of Emby contributors led by Joshua Boniface and Andrew Rabert forked the project in December 2018, along with other early contributors including Vasily and dkanada.
Is Jellyfin a fork of Emby?
Yes. Jellyfin descends directly from Emby’s last fully open-source release, version 3.5.2, forked in response to Emby’s decision to close-source its 4.x release.
Is Jellyfin free forever?
Yes. There’s no premium tier, no subscription, and no paid add-on for features like hardware transcoding. The project has no commercial version to eventually push people toward.
What license does Jellyfin use?
GPLv2, the same license as the last open version of Emby it was forked from. The full source code is on GitHub under that license, so anyone can audit it, self-host it, or contribute changes back.
Does a company own Jellyfin?
No. Jellyfin is run by a volunteer core team and funded through community donations via Open Collective, with no corporate ownership or investors involved.
From here, our Jellyfin Server Setup guide covers actually installing it, and the Jellyfin vs Plex and Jellyfin vs Emby comparisons go deeper on how it stacks up against the alternatives today.