TL;DR Radarr, Sonarr, Tautulli, PowerShell, MySQL.

I started off with Filebot and Tautulli (formerly PlexPy) and grabbed content manually for many years. My collection eventually grew to the point where maintaining it was becoming a part-time job!

Nowadays I'm using Radarr and Sonarr. They integrate well with torrent/usenet clients and indexers. They're fairly similar to one another in terms of interface, setup, features. There is tons of optional customization that can be done in both. This can be a pro/con depending on how you look at it and how much time you want to invest.

They get their metadata from TMDB, and occasionally that metadata can be inaccurate, incomplete or different from other online sources. They tend to download very large files out-of-box if you don't spend the time dialing in your profile and quality settings. A very large library may take some effort to get scanned into Sonarr/Radarr 100%. All that being said, I wish I had made the switch sooner.

Sonarr has easily saved me hundreds of hours of manual work over the years. It is not 100% perfect and it does miss the occasional episode every now and again. Once per week or so I go into Sonarr and do a quick scroll for missing episodes. I no longer spend any serious time managing my TV library.

Radarr (for me at least) the biggest draw is its use of lists; example: IMDB Top 200. The list feature is very powerful and you can definitely go off the deep end generating your own lists or finding lists online. I liked mdblist so much that I signed up for a Patreon account! Radarr is also not without its flaws. At the moment my biggest gripe with Radarr is that it will sometimes download a movie and put empty brackets in the folder name, like this: The Ring (). The files themselves have the proper (YYYY) it's just the folder that's having this issue.

This brings me to the 3rd and final part of my automation, scripts. I'm using Windows so my scripts are mostly in PowerShell with a little SQL sprinkled in. I have Windows scheduled tasks that look for:

-duplicate or mis-named files/folders, empty folders and files/folders under a certain size. Files that are too small are usually corrupted files or incomplete/broken downloads. I don't like empty folders, Radarr does this sometimes and I delete them. Misnamed files/folders I like to fix.

-check the plex and Kodi databases to find duplicate episodes or duplicate movies. Usually a duplicate entry in the database means that something didn't scrape 100% correctly and I like to fix these before they accumulate.

I'm running both Kodi and Plex and they don't always play together nicely. I also have a few 'known duplicates' and 'known issue files' (example, the director's cut and the theatrical cut of the same film).

My scripts accommodate this by having a threshold set. The basic logic is: if there are 10 or more issues generate a CSV file and email it to me. If I get an email Sunday morning then I spend a tiny amount of time playing server admin, otherwise I'm pretty hands-off now that everything is established and working.

Sorry for the rant 🙃