no VPN or IP whitelisting or any other workaround required

But what about this? I can spin up a Docker image of Plex, log in, and it just works. My tech illiterate family members and friends can access it and I don't have to deal with setting all of these other items up. Plex will just use UPnP out of the box whereas I'd need to set up DLNA or some other means to get remote Jellyfin access working.

Maybe I am wrong but this is why myself and others opt to just use Plex for family and friends and Jellyfin locally. 🙂

90% of the TVs out there. Not everyone has an android tv.

What url are you giving me for jellyfin? You’ve exposed jellyfin to the open internet? You know how stupid that is?

I do think it's weird that Plex decided to put hardware transcoding behind a paid membership, so that's obviously a negative, but it sounds like the argument for jellyfin is that it's free but you get less. That's ok, I'm not dragging jellyfin through the mud on this, but you have to admit many people think their Plex purchase is worth it compared to jellyfin.

Remote access is the single area where Plex is better.

Saying things like this is laughable. JellyFin is basically temu plex, better at pretty much nothing other than being open source. At best it matches it in some ways, at worst it is significantly worse and lacking features.

Everything about Jellyfin is free. This includes hardware transcoding, which is subscription based on Plex.

If the server owner has a lifetime pass, theres no subscription fee needed by anyone. Hardware transcoding on Plex is also significantly better than on JellyFin.

The Jellyfin apps are also much better than they used to be.

But still trash compared to plex.

To me, it seems like a really hard sell when Jellyfin effectively does everything that the paid service does for free.

Again, apart from easy and secure remote streaming.