Question
The Definitive Thread on Open Source Control Panels/ cPanel Alternatives: Part I
Ajenti Domain Technologie Control (GPLHost) FreedomCP ISPConfig 3 Kloxo OpenPanel The Hosting Tool Vesta Virtualmin GPL/Webmin zPanelThis topic has come up repeatedly in the DO community forums; but, rarely, do any of the responses offer specific, insightful reasons why someone prefers one of these CPs over others and/or why someone prefers one of these CPs over cPanel--despite the cost of a cPanel license. Based on the number of times this question has been posed in the DO forums and the number of times cPanel has been requested in the DO UserVoice threads, I'm hoping that we can have a robust comparison of all of the Open Source CPs out there; so as to alleviate the need for anyone else to ever ask this question yet again. Here are some ?s that I'm particularly interested in learning more about: 1.) Which of these Open Source CPs have you tried? 2.) Which CP do you use now? 3.) What did you not like about any of these CPs? 4.) Why did you choose the CP you're currently using? 5.) What makes cPanel worth the cost, over any of these Open Source CPs? 5.) For those that are not using any CPs, but have researched/studied any of them: What are some of the (a) strengths and/or (b)weaknesses of the various Open Source CPs? So... what do ya'll think?
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A very preliminary report:
Until recently I had only worked with CLI and cPanel (as well as some proprietary CPs here and there, mostly without names, but all forgotten). Currently I am experimenting with setting up mail servers on VPSs using Ubuntu and CentOS, and in that context I have begun using Webmin. The reasons for my choice are that it is one of the first open-source CPs I became aware of, that it appears to support a very wide range of distributions, and that it is easy to install (especially on Ubuntu). This covers questions 1, 2, and 4 (I cannot answer questions 3, 5, and 6 yet.) :-)
So far I am quite satisfied with Webmin, and I will try Virtualmin, as well, soon. Some things appear to not be doable via the CP, but perhaps this is more a sign of my limited experience than of the CP at hand, but going back to using the CLI on occasion is not an issue for me.
For the next few weeks, while I am developing smooth procedures for setting up a secure mail server on various distributions, I will likely continue to use CLI and Webmin/Virtualmin. But eventually I will want to look into other CPs as well: ISPConfig, Ajenti, VHCS, Kloxo (especially when using CentOS), and EHCP (especially when using Ubuntu). Since I am using VPSs with at most 512MB of RAM, the question of how much RAM each of those CPs use will be one of the deciding factors in my long-term choice.
Will report more when I have more data. :-)
(BTW, it is nice to see that the focus of this thread is on comparing the functionality of various CPs and not a quest for “the best” CP. After all, what is “best” depends on a user’s objectives and circumstances.)
Good idea for a question. Here is my input.
Sentora is not on your list, but it is an evolution of Zpanel and it might be something you encounter. Be aware. I setup my VPS completely, and Sentora then corrupted its own MySQL database. There is no recovery from this known problem other than to de-install everything: MySQL, PHP, Dovecot, etc and re-install. Questions about this long-standing problem on the Sentora forum remain open and unanswered. Maybe they’ll fix this in a future release?
My setup Ubuntu 12.04/Apache2/Sentora 1.0. The data corruption didn’t destroy my domains or my domain dbs, but since the /sentora/ path is injected into everything I wiped the slated and am starting over with a new panel. Liking ISPConfig, WebAdmin and VirtualMin but have not installed any of these yet. Researching now.
ISPConfig easy, easy to use, very very hard, complex, manualy to install. I hate.. I will go webmin+virtualmin. top download and bigest comunity.
My choice was ISP Config because i was a newbie and they had step by step tutorials. While the cli always gives you the control you need, ispconfig make common tasks even easier. I have been running my home self hosted websites for 4 years now with ispconfig with no major issues. The only issues i had so far were my insecure php code or because i didn’t update on time got exploited, like with latest ssh exploit.
Vesta CP is definitely the best choice, easy to install and also has great performance, I love that it uses Nginx and also SpamAssassin and fail2ban. That makes for a more secure installation, and the control panel is clean and easy to manage I wrote a small tutorial on how to install with these features here Note: this is for Ubuntu 14.04 but should work for most Linux distributions.