

There are a LOT of pros and cons.
Pros:
- Developed by a professional, multi-disciplined full-time team with some security oversight.
- Hosted caching of The Movie DB for faster lookups
- Provision of SSL communication to and from your server without any special setup
- FREE EPG data caching
- Centralized server management from the web
- Low-speed relay for those stuck behind CGNAT.
- A REALLY solid mobile audio*** player (sorry, but plexamp beats the pants off the JF alternatives)
- Centralized Login for your friends and family with email-based password reset
- 2FA already set up
- A nice reflector gauge to see if your* ports are open and what your limits are
- Great client support on a LOT of devices
- Search is fast out of the box, even with extensive collections
- Their clients tend to do a better job supporting all the decoding features on every player
- Very reasonable Tuner support (but somewhat ugly) **
Cons:
- Not free
- Not Open
- They have a lot of your historical data and will eventually sell it when they sell the company. This is not going to be optional. That data is worth a lot and they likely already have enough EULA rights to sell it to whoever asks. Imagine if the MPAA gets in on the fun.
- Their security history is quite dicey
- The lifetime membership will eventually be enshitified as it’s not economically sound in the long run
- They constantly change the terms of the agreement.
- They constantly remove features people are using
- They constantly push to share data between users
- They constantly push Ads
- They are making previously free features pay.
- Their investors are starving, which makes them a liability.
- Their clients are generally slower.
edit: * a word ** forgot to shout out for the tuner support *** replaced media with audio for clarity
Not OP, I’ve kinda had a middle of the road experience with it.
I run JF and Plex on the same shares.
I dropped 10k tracks on it and a bunch of audiobooks, my stuff is 100% tagged.
I use tailscale to get to the server because here’s no Nat Holepunching going on.
I try to use it as much possible for audio, but some days, I just give in and use plexamp (like a guilty pleasure)
cons:
pros: