While I’m a Ninja dedicated to Plex I’ve ran both Emby and Plex for years together. I’m pretty well versed on both and since I’m a C/C++ programmer as a profession and my development environment of choice is .NET using Visual Studio I like Plex a lot (as a programmer). 
I think both of them get some stuff right and some stuff wrong. Personally I wish they would copy the good from each other as we the users benefit that way.
@adrianwi said:
- Live TV (including support for IPTV) is much better, with a usable TV Guide in a traditional grid format
Plex’s DVR “EPG” is fine for setting up movies and especially TV Shows that record on their own, week after week. It’s probably more intuitive then a grid view.
For LiveTV viewing it sucks badly. A Grid view is so much easier to tune to a specific channel when you KNOW what you want to watch. EG. Tune to CNN or Fox News. When actually watching LiveTV in either interface they should both learn to channel up or down when you press the UP or DOWN button. Both camps should play with LiveChannels on the ShieldTV to learn how easy LiveTV can be. It’s super quick, changes channels fast and is super simple to setup recordings.
- The UI/UX isn’t quite as nice, although the more I use it the less I miss Plex. It doesn’t feel as quick to find things but some of that is probably me still getting used to it
Plex by far has better interfaces generally speaking, from the server to the individual clients. Emby is slower to respond.
- I don’t like the Premiere device limits, or specifically not knowing or being able to decide which devices are using that functionality.
That’s a nasty direction change they “recently” made. I’m grandfathered so this doesn’t affect me but they should re-think this. Emby is become far less “open source” and moving to closed sources. They’ve pulled several clients in the last year and are now pushing their paid service hard. They are trying to copy Plex’s Plex Pass but are a bit to aggressive and their “pop ups” are quite annoying.
Their premium device limits are super confusing to almost everyone and isn’t clearly specified, nor can you as the admin determine what devices to allow or not. So your friends could get one of your “licenses” while you have to pay if you add a new device (not smart).
- Library scans are taking long in emby, and you can only schedule full scans rather than individual libraries
10 times longer at least. Emby can be very frustrating waiting for libs to load. The plus side is they go directly to the meta-data sites without using a middle man. The con is that they have to throttle the calls to not get you banned. With Plex you hit their proxy servers and they are quick and you have no fear of getting banned. If Emby did something similar with a proxy (and direct as fallback) they would have the best of both worlds.
I currently use Emby as my main DVR while Plex sorts out their issues. But I can’t use it as my daily driver. The ShieldTV client is full of bugs and often wants to transcode files that it should clearly direct play.
Anyone with limited upload bandwidth on their server will do far better using Plex then Emby with the ABR feature as it can adjust the bandwidth used to maximize your upload bandwidth. So if you only have 5 to 10Mb upload bandwidth and need/want to support 1 or 2 simultaneous external clients Plex is clearly the better choice streaming wise.
As a developer and what I’d call a SUPER POWER USER of media servers with a large library I vastly appreciate the extra options Emby has that allows me to tune my system more for a lot of things (shame there isn’t more control over bandwidth). However Emby’s server dashboard has no rhyme or reason to where you find options. You have to go hunting for settings at times and they aren’t where you think they should be.
For me the make it or break it for Emby vs Plex use is that all the Plex clients I need work and half the Emby clients still have issues. If I can’t reliably play my content then no amount of server options make it useful as a daily driver for me. It’s getting there but isn’t ready for prime time yet. They need a UI makeover badly.
Don’t get me wrong, Emby has a lot of nice features I wish Plex had or did the same way such as negative filters, collections, User accounts, Emby Connect, ability to select what hubs you want and what order they appear. Emby is by far more flexible but just doesn’t work as well overall.
