Jellyfin is completely free and open source, with no paywall anywhere, including hardware transcoding and every official app it ships. Emby is free to install too, but a lot of what makes it feel polished, hardware-accelerated transcoding, offline mobile downloads, DVR, and a handful of native apps, sits behind a paid Emby Premiere subscription that runs $4.99 a month, $54 a year, or $119 once for life.
🇫🇷 Ce guide est aussi disponible en français : Jellyfin vs Emby : gratuit ou payant, lequel choisir en 2026 ?
Quick note: everything below is about running a media server for your personal, legally acquired media library, discs you’ve ripped, home videos, photos, music you’ve bought. Neither Jellyfin nor Emby hosts, indexes, or fetches content from anywhere outside your own drives, and nothing in this guide touches torrents, IPTV, or debrid services.
Why do Jellyfin and Emby look so similar?
If Jellyfin’s interface reminds you of Emby, that’s not a coincidence, it’s history. Jellyfin started in December 2018 as a fork of Emby’s last fully open-source release, version 3.5.2, put together by a group of community members after Emby announced its next major version would go closed source. Jellyfin’s own project history lays out more than a licensing dispute: a paywall had already appeared for free users in an earlier 3.x release, client and server code was gradually being pulled behind closed doors, and the team behind Emby had grown less receptive to outside contributions. Emby kept building its own product with a business model attached, and the two projects have run in parallel ever since. They share the same ancestry and a fair amount of interface DNA, but almost none of their current code.
Jellyfin vs Emby at a glance
Here’s the short version before we get into each row on its own.
| Jellyfin | Emby | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | 100% free, forever | Free core server; Emby Premiere is $4.99/mo, $54/yr, or $119 lifetime |
| License | Open source (GPL-2.0) | Proprietary, source-available since 2018 |
| Hardware transcoding | Free for everyone | Requires Emby Premiere |
| Official client apps | Desktop, Android, iOS, Android TV/Fire TV, Roku, WebOS, Tizen, Xbox | Android, iOS, Fire TV, Apple TV, Android TV, Xbox One, PS4, smart TVs |
| Apple TV | No first-party app (Infuse, Swiftfin, or Reefy instead) | Native app |
| Live TV & DVR | Free, built in via plugins | Live TV free; full DVR needs Premiere |
| Remote access | Fully self-hosted, no account required | Optional Emby Connect account simplifies pairing |
| Offline downloads on mobile | Depends on the client | Requires Emby Premiere |
| Plugin catalog | Large and actively developed | Smaller, more curated |
The rest of this guide unpacks each of those rows, starting with the one most people care about first: cost.
Cost and licensing: is Emby actually free?
Jellyfin doesn’t have a paid tier of any kind. Every feature, including the ones Emby charges for, ships free under Jellyfin’s open-source license, GPL-2.0 on the main server repository, and always has.
Emby’s own pricing page lists three options for Emby Premiere: $4.99 billed monthly, $54 for a year (roughly $4.50 a month), or a $119 one-time lifetime license covering up to 30 devices in a single household. Premiere is what unlocks hardware-accelerated transcoding, offline media sync to phones and tablets, DVR and scheduled recordings, automatic content conversion, cover art treatments, and smaller extras like CarPlay/Android Auto support and voice control through Alexa or Google Home.
What’s not locked: Emby’s core playback isn’t behind a paywall. You can run Emby completely free and stream to its web app and most clients without ever buying Premiere; the subscription unlocks the extras above, not basic streaming itself.
Does paying for Emby get you better transcoding?
Transcoding is what happens when a file needs to be converted or resized on the fly, say a 4K file playing on a phone over a slow connection, instead of streamed as-is. Jellyfin gives every user free access to hardware-accelerated transcoding on supported Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD hardware, no tier required. Emby locks that same hardware acceleration behind Emby Premiere, so a free Emby install falls back to slower software transcoding.
A real number, not a marketing claim: on Emby’s own community forum, one longtime user ran the same hardware transcode on both servers side by side and posted the results: Jellyfin held a steady ~80 fps, while Emby struggled to clear ~30 fps doing the identical job on the identical hardware. That’s one user’s own test, not a controlled lab benchmark, and results vary by GPU and codec, but it’s a real, citable data point from Emby’s own community, and it lines up with hardware transcoding being one of the most common reasons people give for moving to Jellyfin after they’ve already paid for Premiere.
Which has better client apps, Jellyfin or Emby?
Jellyfin’s own downloads page lists official, open-source apps for desktop, Android, iOS, Android TV, Fire TV, Roku, LG WebOS, Samsung Tizen, and Xbox, all built and maintained by the Jellyfin project itself. The one real gap is Apple TV: there’s no first-party Jellyfin app for tvOS, which is why Infuse, listed on that same page as a recommended third-party option, and community projects like Swiftfin and the newer Reefy exist to cover that specific hole. We go deep on all three in our Jellyfin on Apple TV comparison if that’s the device you’re planning around.
Emby covers that same Apple TV ground natively, plus PlayStation, through its own apps and the cross-platform Emby Theater client. That’s really the one area where Emby’s client lineup still has a genuine edge: fewer decisions to make, since there’s one official app per platform instead of picking between three community options the way Apple TV users have to on Jellyfin.
Is Jellyfin’s plugin catalog actually bigger than Emby’s?
Being open source cuts both ways here, but mostly it cuts in Jellyfin’s favor. Anyone can submit, fork, or maintain a Jellyfin plugin, and the catalog has grown accordingly: metadata scrapers, subtitle providers, integrations with other self-hosted apps, and more niche tools than most people will ever need. Emby’s plugin catalog is smaller and more tightly curated, since Emby reviews and maintains more of it centrally, fewer options, a bit more consistency across the ones that exist. It’s a pattern that comes up constantly in community discussions: a Reddit thread with more than 130 comments comparing the two put it plainly, Jellyfin wins over Emby on external plugin support, even though the two interfaces still look almost identical.
Is Jellyfin more private than Emby?
Jellyfin runs entirely on your own network, no required account, no analytics phoning home anywhere. Remote access is something you set up yourself, typically through a reverse proxy or a mesh VPN like Tailscale, the same way we cover in our Jellyfin server setup guide.
Emby offers Emby Connect, an optional account service that makes remote pairing and discovery easier, especially for less technical households. You can skip it and self-host Emby the same way you would Jellyfin, but Connect is the path Emby points most users toward by default, and using it does mean an Emby account exists somewhere outside your own server.
Either way, it runs everywhere: both Jellyfin and Emby work fine behind a reverse proxy like Caddy or Nginx Proxy Manager, or over a VPN like Tailscale or WireGuard, and both run happily in Docker on the same NAS, mini PC, or Proxmox box.
Switching from Plex? Should you pick Jellyfin or Emby?
A lot of the traffic landing on comparisons like this one is coming from people re-evaluating Plex after its lifetime pass jumped from $249.99 to $749.99 in July 2026, something we cover in detail in our Jellyfin vs Plex breakdown. Both Jellyfin and Emby are legitimate places to land. Jellyfin makes the most sense if the goal is paying nothing, ever, and keeping full control over the code running on your own hardware. Emby makes more sense if what you actually liked about Plex was the out-of-the-box polish, and you don’t mind paying something, just a lot less than Plex now asks, to keep more of that feel. It’s also genuinely fine to just run both on the same server for a week and see which one your household reaches for before deleting either.
Jellyfin vs Emby: which should you choose?
Short version: choose Jellyfin if free-forever and full control matter more to you than out-of-the-box polish. Choose Emby if paying roughly what one streaming subscription costs a month buys you enough convenience, especially around client apps and DVR, to be worth it.
Where Jellyfin pulls ahead:
- Every feature, including hardware transcoding, is free forever
- Fully open source (GPL-2.0), nothing hidden and nothing to take on faith
- No required account anywhere, zero phone-home by design
- Large, fast-moving, community-built plugin catalog
Where it still falls short:
- No first-party Apple TV app; you’ll be picking a third-party client
- Occasional rough edges on less common devices or codecs
- A bit more tinkering to get advanced features like hardware acceleration working
Where Emby pulls ahead:
- Native, polished apps across more platforms out of the box, including Apple TV and PlayStation
- Emby Connect makes remote access simple for less technical households
- DVR, offline mobile sync, and other creature comforts once you’re on Premiere
Where it still falls short:
- Hardware transcoding and several other features are locked behind Emby Premiere
- Proprietary since 2018, so you can’t freely audit or fork the server the way you can with Jellyfin
- Emby Connect is the easiest path to remote access, which is one more account than Jellyfin ever asks you to create
Our full Jellyfin library covers server setup and device-specific clients like Apple TV; our growing Emby coverage lives in its own archive; and the wider media server hub ties every comparison in this silo together if you’re weighing more than just these two.
FAQ
Is Jellyfin just Emby?
No, though it started as one. Jellyfin forked from Emby’s open-source 3.5.2 release in December 2018 after Emby moved to a closed, proprietary model, and the two have been developed independently since. They share ancestry and some interface conventions, not a codebase.
Is there anything better than Jellyfin?
Depends what you’re optimizing for. Plex still has the most polished onboarding and the widest device support, but its lifetime pass jumped from $249.99 to $749.99 in July 2026. Emby offers more polished native apps if you’re willing to pay for Premiere. Whether either counts as “better” than Jellyfin comes down to whether you value zero cost and full openness (then no) or a more turnkey experience (then maybe).
Is it legal to use Jellyfin or Emby?
Yes, both are legal software you’re free to install on your own hardware. What matters is what you put on them: this comparison, like the rest of our guides, is about serving your personal, legally acquired media library, not a way to access anyone else’s content.
Do Emby and Jellyfin use the same port?
Yes. Both default to port 8096 for HTTP. Jellyfin’s codebase forked directly from Emby’s in 2018 and simply never changed the default, a detail confirmed on Emby’s own community forum whenever someone runs into the two fighting over the same port on one machine.
Which is best, Jellyfin or Emby?
Neither wins outright, they’re built around different priorities. Jellyfin wins on cost, openness, and privacy. Emby wins on out-of-the-box app polish and a couple of creature comforts, if you’re fine paying for them.
How much does Emby Premiere cost?
$4.99 a month, $54 a year, or $119 as a one-time lifetime license, per Emby’s own pricing page. Lifetime covers up to 30 devices in a single household; larger households need Emby’s Extended Premiere options.
Why would someone choose Emby over Jellyfin?
Mostly for the native apps: Emby ships polished, first-party clients on more platforms, including Apple TV and PlayStation, without needing a third-party player. Some users also find Emby’s default metadata matching and DVR features more reliable out of the box.
Can I run Jellyfin and Emby on the same server?
Yes. They’re separate applications, and Docker makes it easy to run both in isolated containers on one machine. Just remember they share the same default port, 8096, so you’ll need to remap one of them to avoid a conflict.
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