Actually, it's really not good at handling that sort of thing in my experience. The Plex server doesn't really browse the filesystem, it scans folders for media

Actually, it's really not good at handling that sort of thing in my experience. The Plex server doesn't really browse the filesystem, it scans folders for media files and then parses the names. If you follow their naming scheme with your files it does a great job pulling in metadata and such, but if not it doesn't do so great. You can subsequently choose to view files by "folder", which doesn't actually browse the filesystem directly but instead looks at the database to see where the file came from originally. My experience trying several times since Plex came out (most recently last year) is that this is extremely unreliable and wonky. It'd always mis-recognize files or they'd be completely missing even though they were on disk. They outright do not support directly browsing files AFAIK. So in other words, if your files are reasonably well organized and named following one of the conventions recognized by Plex then it does a pretty amazing job organizing and scraping. On the other hand, if you just have random files that are scattered about or organized by folder or perhaps named differently then Kodi works a whole lot better because it just lets you drill through files on disk (it has a library too, which is functionally about the same as Plex and suffers from similar drawbacks). On the other hand, Plex has way better device support and while you can get transcoding to/from devices in Kodi, Plex is a lot better at it most of the time.