I've been using Plex for a few years to run my home local network media server, with vast majority of usage centered around my music CD collection in the form of MP3 files. It's a fairly simplistic usage pattern so I haven't encountered any problems. Most of the problems I had with running Plex server was my own fault, because I also used Plex as a test case to explore various home server technologies. That's not Plex's fault unless you want to say "Plex makes so many different deployment methods available" is a fault. At the moment I am not motivated to move off Plex. But if I ever do, I recently learned of Jellyfin as an alternative.

I used Plex at its free tier for a while before choosing to pay the one-time lifetime subscription fee to unlock a few features that looked interesting. I ended not using most of those features, but that was fine. A company needs revenue to operate and I paid the company for a product I found useful so the current situation is fine. But like most businesses, Plex is constantly trying to expand its revenue stream. So far that's been in the form of paid features like video rentals but it does make me a bit suspicious. Tech industry history has many tales of companies alienating their existing customers in pursuit of money. I would be disappointed (but not surprised) if one day Plex decide my one-time lifetime subscription should become more than one-time or less than lifetime.

I have my media on my TrueNAS server, and I am running Plex Media Server software on a virtual machine of my Proxmox server. All capability is on my home local network, but I have to periodically sign in to my Plex account to verify my subscription status. If something happens to be offline at this critical time I would be locked out of my own Plex server. This has actually happened a few times, but not (yet) often enough to motivate me to ditch Plex.

Jellyfin improves on both of those problems. It is a free software project so as long as it stays on that ethos, I shouldn't fear my account status changing and getting charged more money. In fact, I should be able to run everything on my home network server and never have to authenticate against an account server on the internet. Jellyfin is a less mature project with fewer features than Plex, but it has the "keeping MP3 collection organized" feature already and that's most of what I need. If Plex (either the business or the software) gives me enough grief, I will likely migrate to Jellyfin for my home local network media server needs.

Jellyfin logo is from their UX repository https://github.com/jellyfin/jellyfin-ux