Dhruv Bhutani / Android Authority
Last weekend we published an article discussing how feature creep starts killing Plex† This article has sparked a lot of discussion about Plex as a business, where the service could be headed, and whether people will stick to it. In this article, we ran a Plex survey to find out how our readers were feeling.
The results of this poll are below. We also have some comments from readers to give some context to the data. One thing is pretty clear though: Plex has its die-hards.
Have you considered switching from Plex?
Results
This poll was first published on July 3, 2022 and received a whopping 4,630 votes. As it turns out, the majority of comments – 2,322 or more than half – confirm that they are happy with Plex.
The other half of the responses are divided into different categories. 11.6% have already left Plex for Emby, while 11.2% have left for Jellyfin, making a total of 22.8% of readers who have already left Plex. Meanwhile, 22.2% of respondents in this Plex survey say they are thinking about leaving Plex by trying other services. However, they have not taken any serious steps yet. Finally, a minor 4.9% of respondents admitted that they do not use a personal media service (PMS).
Essentially, the majority of people – 72.4% – who read about how feature creep could destroy Plex are still using Plex. Plus, most don’t go anywhere anytime soon. Does this show that Plex has nothing to worry about? Well, the comments may shed some light on that.
Plex Polls
- Nightmare: The author is perfect. I bought a lifetime Plex Pass because it works so well with my personal media files on my NAS. When the crappy movies and TV shows I could care less about started popping up, I knew the future of Plex was at stake. The developers have time to force this on us, but I still can’t change the orientation of photos through their UI? I use Plex for the personal media streaming feature, nothing more, nothing less and Plex would do well to remember that.
- amateur wizard: I’m in the same boat, invested heavily in Plex for a similar amount of time, but to them my opinions along with those of the other forum members don’t seem to matter. So many pleas were made for the sake of the Camera Upload feature and plugins. Monetary incentives are all they are interested in. As much as I love what Plex can do. I’m waiting for Jellyfin to outperform or just get similar in the ways I need to, to ditch Plex in its entirety (no option for this in the poll haha).
- Patrick Ford: I originally bought Plex and PlexPass a few years ago so that I could rip my media from disk and stream my library at home and give access to friends and relatives wherever they are. I still really like Plex, but it’s getting harder and harder to avoid some of the new features I don’t want to use. With a library close to 200 TB, I really don’t want to switch to anything else. Hopefully Plex will put in a little more effort to customize Plex and Plex Server. In any case, for now I am quite satisfied. Perhaps because the alternative is frightening.
- SiliconAddic: Plex has turned into a **** show. Whoever their UI designers are all deserve to be fired. I call it an infection. It originally infected the Apple application first…. But in the end it moved over to the Windows application and then to the web UI app. When you search, no real window is displayed. It just brings this stupid list of irrelevant information. It is not sorted in a relevant and functioning way. Or. I can list 50 other stupid designs simply because Plex has lost all competence. Then there is a simple fact. Does anyone have a large database on Plex? It is absolute rubbish of databases these days. I can appreciate that they want to make money, because I’m sorry, but everyone deserves to earn money for their work. But not at the expense of speed, stability and core functionality.
- Dark Era Tires: The Plex streaming channels and discover etc can all be disabled/hidden. Just unpin them from your home screen.
My Plex instance only shows my content and nothing else, it looks and behaves exactly the way it did before they rolled out those features and all it took was a few clicks in the settings.