Jellyfin is a fully free media server forked from Emby. It streams your own video, music, and photo libraries to any device via web, mobile, and TV apps, with no subscription, no account, and no data sent to external servers. Everything runs on hardware you control, and the project accepts no premium tiers or hidden telemetry.
Jellyfin
jellyfin.org
Our take
Jellyfin is the cleanest privacy-respecting alternative to Plex: no vendor account, no cloud dependency, nothing phoning home. The trade-off is setup effort: you are running a server, managing libraries, and troubleshooting transcoding yourself, which Plex historically smoothed over. Hardware requirements for live transcoding can also be significant depending on your library. For anyone willing to invest a few hours in initial setup, Jellyfin gives you full ownership of your media server with no ongoing obligations to a third party.
GitHub at a glance
jellyfin/jellyfin
Stars
53,544
Last commit
today
healthy
License
GPL-2.0
Latest release
v10.11.11
15d ago
Listed in
Jellyfin alternatives
Jellyfin license, in plain English
GPL-2.0 Strong copyleft
Free to use and modify, but anything you distribute that is built on it must also be open under the same license.
Permits
- Commercial use
- Modification
- Distribution
- Private use
Requires
- Disclose source
- Same license
- State changes
- License and copyright notice
Does not provide
- Liability cover
- Warranty
Why it matters: Strong copyleft keeps every distributed version open. A vendor cannot fold this into a closed product and ship it without releasing their changes.
Plain-language summary of the project's license, not legal advice. Read the full text for the exact terms.