Plex poll results: It’s frustrating, but you’re keeping it

Last weekend, we published an article discussing how feature creep is starting to kill Plex. This article got a lot of conversation going about Plex as a company, where the service could be headed, and whether or not folks will stick with it. Inside this article, we had a Plex poll to find out how our readers felt.

The results of this poll are below. We’ve also got 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 away from Plex?

Results

This poll was first published on July 3, 2022, and it received a whopping 4,630 votes. As it turns out, the majority of responses — 2,322, or over half — affirmed that they are happy with Plex.

The other half of the responses are split across a variety of categories. 11.6% have already left Plex for Emby while 11.2% have left for Jellyfin, bringing a total of 22.8% of readers who have already abandoned Plex. Meanwhile, 22.2% of responders in this Plex poll say that they are mulling over leaving Plex by trying out other services. However, they haven’t made any serious moves yet. Finally, a minor 4.9% of responders admitted that they don’t use a personal media service (PMS).

Essentially, the majority of people — 72.4% — reading about how feature creep could be destroying Plex are still using Plex. Additionally, most aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Does this show that Plex has nothing to worry about? Well, the comments can shed some light on that.

Plex poll comments

• Nightmare: The author is spot on. I bought a lifetime Plex Pass because it does such a great job with my personal media files on my NAS. When the crappy movies and TV shows that I could care less about started showing up I knew the future of Plex was in question. The devs have time to foist 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 be well advised to remember that.
• Amateur Wizard: I’m in the same boat, been heavily invested 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 the only thing they’re interested in. As much as I love what Plex can do. I’m waiting for Jellyfin to supercede or just become comparable in the ways I require, to ditch Plex in entirety (There’s no option for this in the poll haha).
• Patrick Ford: I originally bought into Plex and PlexPass, several years ago, so I could rip my media from disc and stream my library within my home and give access to friends and relatives, wherever they may be. I still like Plex a lot, but its getting harder to avoid some of the new features that I’m not interested in using. With a nearly 200TB library, I really don’t want to switch to something else. Hopefully, Plex will put some greater effort into Plex and Plex Server customization. For now at least, I’m still pretty happy. Maybe 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 then eventually it went over to the windows application and then finally the web UI app. When you search, it doesn’t pull up an actual window. It just brings this dumbass list that gives irrelevant information. It isn’t sorted in a relevant and functioning manner. Either. I can list 50 other stupid ass designs simply because Plex has lost any competence. Then there’s a simple fact of the matter. Is anyone who has a large database on Plex? It’s databases absolute garbage nowadays. I can appreciate them wanting to make money because I’m sorry but everyone deserves to make money for their job. But not at the expense of speed, stability, and it’s core functionality.
• Dark Era Tapes: The Plex streaming channels and discover etc can all be turned off/hidden. Just unpin them from your home screen.
  My Plex instance only shows my content and nothing else, it looks and behaves exactly like it looked before they rolled those features out and all it took was a couple of clicks in the settings.