Jellyfin for Music and Audiobooks in 2026: We Tested the Free Plex Alternative

In short:

• Jellyfin is free and open source, with no pass, no tiers and no account with a company — the main reason people are leaving Plex for it.
• It’s good for music. Pair it with Finamp on your phone or Feishin on the desktop.
• Jellyfin 12 finally does audiobooks. In our test of 12.1, an M4B kept all five chapters and resumed where we stopped.
• Rough edges remain: a folder of MP3s became five separate books, and the web client doesn’t show chapters.
• The catch: you run the server. That’s great if you enjoy it, and a real cost if you don’t.

Why are people moving from Plex to Jellyfin?

Mostly the price. Plex Pass went from $4.99 to $6.99 a month in 2025, and in July 2026 the lifetime pass jumped to $749.99 — we walked through every change in is Plex Pass worth it. The Jellyfin team’s reply was a joke post announcing their own price increase, to $0.00.

It landed because it’s true. Jellyfin is a community project with no company behind it to raise prices, sell data or redesign the apps against its users’ wishes. That shows in the numbers: in the selfh.st 2025 survey of 4,081 self-hosters, 2,487 said they run Jellyfin for media streaming, about twice as many as Plex (1,219). On GitHub the server has more than 57,000 stars.

The community is the best part. Most questions you’ll have were asked and answered on the forums or Reddit a year ago, and the third-party apps below are made by people who use Jellyfin themselves.

Is Jellyfin good for music?

Yes, especially since the apps caught up. Jellyfin organizes a music library by artist and album from your files’ tags, and 12.0 added ListenBrainz-based similar artists and ReplayGain album gain, so albums play at a consistent volume.

The official apps are fine for video; for music, most people use a dedicated player:

• Finamp on iPhone and Android — free, open source, with strong offline downloads. It’s the closest thing to Plexamp for Jellyfin.
• Feishin on the desktop — a polished player that also works with Navidrome.
• Symfonium on Android — a one-time purchase that talks to Jellyfin, Plex, Emby, Navidrome and OpenSubsonic servers from one app.

One thing to know if you use Subsonic-style apps: Jellyfin doesn’t speak the Subsonic API itself. A third-party plugin, Subfin, adds it, but it’s a small project — check it’s maintained before relying on it.

Can Jellyfin handle audiobooks now? What we found testing 12.1

Jellyfin 12.0 folded the old Bookshelf plugin into the server and, in its own words, “chapters are extracted from audiobooks.” Release notes are one thing; we wanted to see it. So on September 28, 2026, we ran Jellyfin 12.1 in Docker with a public-domain LibriVox recording of The Happy Prince and Other Tales in two shapes: one M4B file with five embedded chapters, and the same book as a folder of five MP3s. We put a copy into a Books library and another into a Music library — the workaround Plex users know.

	Books library	Music library
One M4B with chapters	✅ One audiobook, all 5 chapters with names and start times	❌ One long track, 0 chapters
A folder of 5 MP3s	⚠️ Five separate books, one per file	An album with 5 tracks

What else we saw:

• Resume works. After stopping 40 minutes in, the book showed as 38% played and appeared in the “continue” list.
• The web client doesn’t list chapters. The book’s page shows the cover, author, length and a resume button, but no chapter list. The chapters are in the server’s data; it’s up to each app to use them.
• Use the Books library for audiobooks. The Music library threw the chapters away entirely.

The MP3 result matters because a lot of audiobooks — every LibriVox title, many CD rips — arrive as a folder of files, not one M4B. If your library looks like that, either combine each book into an M4B first, or use a server built for audiobooks.

Which apps play Jellyfin audiobooks?

• Plappa on iPhone and iPad is made for exactly this: Jellyfin and Audiobookshelf audiobooks, with chapters, synced progress and offline downloads.
• Symfonium on Android handles audiobooks from Jellyfin with playback speed and resume points.
• Finamp only shows music libraries, so it won’t see a Books library.

Before you upgrade to 12: check your apps

Jellyfin 12.0 has breaking changes. According to its release notes, the old /emby and /mediabrowser routes are gone — “old third-party clients that rely on them will stop working” — and legacy authorization is now disabled by default, even on existing installs. We saw it ourselves: 12.1 rejected the old token header our first test script used.

In practice: update your apps before the server. If a favorite app hasn’t caught up, an admin can switch legacy authorization back on for now, but it’s scheduled to be removed entirely.

The part the release notes don’t mention: you’re the sysadmin

Jellyfin costs nothing, but it runs somewhere. For a family library that usually means a NAS or an always-on PC with two drives, which we priced at roughly $1,000–1,100 upfront plus electricity in what a NAS really costs over five years. Then there’s remote access (Tailscale or a reverse proxy), updates like the 12.0 changes above, backups, and being the person the family calls when the music stops. We wrote about that side honestly in self-hosting isn’t free.

For plenty of people that’s part of the fun. For plenty of others, it’s the reason they stayed on Plex or went back to Spotify.

How to try Jellyfin without switching off Plex

You don’t have to choose on day one. Jellyfin can read the same folders Plex already uses, and if you give it read-only access it can’t change a single file. That’s how we ran our test: Jellyfin in Docker, with the media folder mounted read-only.

docker run -d --name jellyfin -p 8096:8096 \
  -v /path/to/jellyfin/config:/config \
  -v /path/to/jellyfin/cache:/cache \
  -v /path/to/your/audio:/media:ro \
  jellyfin/jellyfin:latest

Open http://your-server:8096, create an account, and add a Music library for your music folder and a Books library for your audiobooks folder. Don’t point both libraries at the same folder: in our first attempt Jellyfin shared the items between them and the audiobooks came out as music. Give it a few weeks next to Plex, install Finamp or Plappa on your phone, and see which one your family actually opens.

When Jellyfin is the right answer

• You already have a server, or want one, and enjoy looking after it.
• You want one place for movies, TV and music, free forever, with a community behind it.
• Your audiobooks are mostly M4B files. Jellyfin 12 handles those properly now.

If your library is mostly audiobooks — especially multi-file ones — Audiobookshelf is still the more complete tool: it was built for spoken audio, groups folders into books and has its own apps. Plenty of people run both.

Where own.audio fits

own.audio is for people who like the idea of Jellyfin — your own files, no subscription, nobody analyzing what you play — but don’t want a server at home. It will be a hosted library for the music, audiobooks and podcasts you already own: you upload your files once, and we run everything else.

The apps will be free, with separate ones for music, audiobooks and podcasts, and the whole family shares one library. You pay only for the storage you use, at $0.05 per GB a month: a library of 5,000 songs and 30 audiobooks, about 48 GB, is roughly $2.40 a month — and you can run your own numbers. We’re also building compatibility with OpenSubsonic apps, so a player like Symfonium can connect to your own.audio library too.

It’s still in development; the roadmap shows where each app stands. And if you’d rather run Jellyfin yourself, that’s a great choice too — the files are yours either way.