Open-Source Netflix Alternative

Why people look for a Netflix alternative

This one needs an honest framing: self-hosting does not give you Netflix's catalogue, and nobody should pretend otherwise. What it gives you is your own library — the films you bought, the shows you archived from your own discs — streamable to any device with no monthly fee, no region locking, and no titles vanishing at the end of a licensing window.

Why this one

Jellyfin is the purest expression of "my media, my server" with no accounts, no telemetry and no upsells. Pair it with the *arr tools for managing a library you legitimately own. If you mainly want to watch and not administer anything, Netflix is still the better product — this is a trade, not a replacement.

Before you migrate

Self-hosting means you are the one who gets paged when something breaks at 11pm. Before committing, be honest about three things:

• Where will it run? A €4/month VPS handles most of these comfortably. A NAS or spare mini PC is even cheaper if you already own one.
• Who backs it up? A self-hosted service with no backup is worse than a cloud service, because at least the cloud service had someone else's redundancy. Set up automated backups before you migrate real data into it.
• How will you reach it remotely? Most people start with a WireGuard or Tailscale tunnel rather than exposing ports directly. That is the right instinct.

Migrating your data

Nearly every Netflix competitor listed above ships an import path — CSV, JSON, or a documented export format. The practical move is to migrate one project or one folder first, run both systems side by side for a week, and only then cut over. Export formats are rarely as clean as the marketing suggests, and it is much easier to notice a broken import on a test set than on five years of records.