The Runners-Up Second Place: EmbyĮmby splits the difference between Plex and the less polished media servers that make up the rest of our list. It's leading the pack in the media server space. But overall, the sum of Plex's advantages is greater than the sum of its disadvantages. It doesn't play that well with Kodi (Kodi fanatics, we have your best choice ranked at #2).

Plex isn't perfect, of course – it still has too many channels that don't work on certain platforms, and idealists will note that it's not open source. Like many of its competitors, it has a free version and a paid “premium” version, which is priced fairly and includes some solid features (like access to your content outside your local network).

But Plex is still quite powerful, and it offers the essential media server combination of local content streaming and “channels” full of streaming content from major networks. It's pushing the idea of a media server beyond the concept's power-user origins, and making media servers attractive to more casual cord cutters.

Plex is easy to set up and easy to use, and it's quite effective. It's the most polished and user-friendly of the media server applications, which is a big advantage in a space that's crowded by clunky options that are only a few steps removed from their DIY origins. The Winner: PlexĪs far as stand-alone media server applications go, Plex is the clear winner. Use it as your guide – or take us to task in the comments if you disagree. On this list, we're cutting through the confusion and naming the best media server applications. In short, if you want to make your local content available on multiple devices, you have a lot of options – too many, in fact. There are ways to rig up Kodi as a server or to integrate these other servers into a Kodi environment. Witness the crowded field of media server programs, for example: you have Plex, Emby, PlayOn, and many more. Now, the opposite is true: we have so many options for streaming, organizing, and casting content that the difficult part is actually deciding which one to use. It wasn't that long ago that cord cutters had to hunt around for solutions to very basic cord cutting problems.

Universal media server review