The Definitive Thread on Open Source Control Panels/ cPanel Alternatives: Part I

Greetings:

I’ve been digging around the DigitalOcean (“DO”) forums & UserVoice threads, looking for insightful recommendations on the various Open Source Control Panels (“CPs”) out there. DO clients use an array of various CPs and I’m hoping to whittle the list down to 1, 2 or 3 highly-recommended CPs. It appears, based on my cursory, anecdotal evidence, that the following list represents the most popular CPs among DO users:

<pre>Ajenti Domain Technologie Control (GPLHost) FreedomCP ISPConfig 3 Kloxo OpenPanel The Hosting Tool Vesta Virtualmin GPL/Webmin zPanel</pre>

This 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?