Introduction
If you’ve ever purchased web hosting or helped a client with setting up their site on inmotion, hostgator or godaddy you’re very likely to have come across a control panel known as CPanel.
It is a very VERY popular, powerful and awesome control panel to manage your websites, emails and various other things, it’s the most used hosting control panel in the world and I love working with it.
The problem with CPanel is that for individuals and tinkers who runs their own servers, and want to host their websites on them, CPanel is not free and will cost you around $14.95 USD / Month ( From LicensePal).
Therefore I’ve often looked for alternatives to CPanel, both for curiosity and because I wanted something free that i could throw on a VPS and host web development client’s websites as well as my own little projects and such.
Often the ones I find are either outdated, doesn’t work or horribly insecure, I’ve looked around the internet extensively as well as looked at other blogs giving their alternatives to CPanel, one of the most comprehensive that I could find was Lord Matt’s blog.
Keep in mind that this list is based on my requirements and experiences and there might be better control panels out there that suits your need better.
These are all in random orders and I didn’t want to rate them or call one better than the other, some of these might not suit your needs and some might be perfect, it’s all subjective…
For anyone wondering, the WHM part of the name CPanel/WHM is the Web Host Manager part of CPanel, it is the back-end part of CPanel where you setup hosting plans and configure the server.
CPanel Alternatives
ServerPilot
Website: http://serverpilot.io
Documentation: https://serverpilot.io/community/
ServerPilot is a relatively new Control Panel type application that you don’t have to install on your server in order to use, it is all in one central location which connects to your server using their “agent”.
To use ServerPilot you need to have a fresh Ubuntu 14.04 (Because it’s the latest Long Term Release) server, and run the command that is specified in their documentation, this will install the serverpilot agent and set up all the necessary stuff for you, once that is done, you simply login to https://manage.serverpilot.io and click Connect Server, you will then be prompted to name your server and give the ServerPilot agent a password, you then get a command specific to your server and user that you will need to paste into the terminal on your server via SSH (or using something like Putty on Windows)
ServerPilot also keeps your packages up to date, monitors the system and gives you a nice interface to look through all of the statistics, logs and usage.
ServerPilot also makes it really easy to deploy PHP applications by separating each app with its own system user, SSH/SFTP account and even PHP Version.
You can also quickly and easily setup a database via ServerPilot.
ServerPilot is geared a little more towards developers more so than end users, but if you are a developer or a power-user, this is definitively a tool to checkout!
There is a free version which gives you unlimited websites, firewall configuration, server security updates AND API Access (Awesome!).
If you are interested in SSL/SPDY(no clue what that even is), Real-time analytics and additional SSH/SFTP accounts and priority support, then there are paid plans for $10 and $45 USD / Month.
The referral link below will give you $10 USD in credits that you can use to test the paid version if you want.
https://www.serverpilot.io/?refcode=6870b842bed1
Psst: Check out DigitalOcean and get $10 free credits!
Froxlor
Website: http://froxlor.org
Demo: http://demo.froxlor.org/
Documentation: http://redmine.froxlor.org/projects/froxlor/wiki (outdated and half broken :( )
Probably the control panel with the most organized and easy to navigate interface is Froxlor, it’s an open source project that is licensed under GPLv2, which basically means you’re free to copy, use, modify and distribute the software as long as you make your changes available to the original source, you can also include it commercially but you must disclose that your product uses froxlor… here is a better explanation of GPLv2.
So Froxlor seems to be one of the cleanest and most modern-looking control panels of the bunch, it allows 3 various types of users, Administrators, resellers and customers.
The customer-type user’s dashboard is very clean and easy to navigate, which is a good thing because you want to just give your customers the URL to their control panel and have them be able to figure out what everything does pretty easily, there is no confusing wishy-washy technical terms that might confuse an untrained client.
It unfortunately does not include a file manager, but it lets you create an FTP account very easily, this does complicate things for clients, but if you’re a freelance web designer or developer, you’re the one who should be handling uploading and setting up their site anyways.
It’s open source as well so if you really need this you could probably make it yourself, or somehow integrate the web-based FTP solution; net2ftp with some sort of “if user is logged into the dashboard, grab his user details and plug them into net2ftp and let them browse their site”-yness, or look around on the internet for someone to create a plugin.
VestaCP
Website: http://vestacp.com/
Demo: http://vestacp.com/demo/
Documentation: https://vestacp.com/docs/
VestaCP is a project that I’ve actually contributed to, even thought it’s a very small contribution, I translated it to Norwegian and it got included in the main package as of version 0.9.8-9. :)
You’re welcome fellow Norwegians, if you see some mistakes in my translation feel free to submit corrections to info@vestacp.com, and they will provide you with a translation file that you can edit.
Anyways, VestaCP is also really simple to install, with only 2 simple commands that you’ve got to run on your server there is very little interaction required from you under the installation process and the only issue I came across was with Exim.
The error I got was due to the fact that I used a version of CentOS that came with the full lamp stack and a mail server pre-installed, therefore Exim did not work for receiving emails, although I could send them.
The web-mail that’s included with VestaCP is the best and the most beautiful web-mail available for free; RoundCube.
It has a billing module for WHMCS which is awesome, you can set up various hosting plans in VestaCP that you can sell to your clients, although I’ve not played with this feature yet, It seems like it’s stable and being continually updated.
Kloxo
Website: http://lxcenter.org/software/kloxo
Demo: http://demo.kloxo.com:7778/ (Dead :( )
Documentation: http://wiki.lxcenter.org/index.php/Kloxo_Installation_Guide
Kloxo is a control panel made by LXCenter, the same people who created HyperVM, which is a popular virtual machine manager type thing that I’ve not researched very well and frankly don’t care about.
It’s interface is very similar and most likely inspired by CPanel, so if you really love CPanel’s interface, then this might be a good option for you, as far as I know there is also a script installer ala softaculus available for Kloxo, I have not tested it and do not know how well it works, but it’s there if you need or want it.
The demo for kloxo was down when I tried it, and it seems like there are no other demos available.
According to their website Kloxo integrates with WHMCS, Hostbill and AWBS (Two of them are overpriced, guess which ones), this is a plus for me as I intend to use WHMCS or BoxBilling to manage my billing and hosting for my freelance clients.
Kloxo also allows you to have re-sellers, so you could practically resell your hosting services as well for some additional income, although it will quickly become a mess if you try to do this as a one-man-show.
So all in all, Kloxo pretty much has all the functions you need from a web hosting control panel, I’ll check it out further and update my review once I’ve got my VPS up and running.
UPDATE, there seems to be lots of bugs in Kloxo, there is a fork called Kloxo-MR created by Mustafa Ramadhan that fixes most of the bugs, but i’d personally stay away from this panel…
ZPanel
Website: http://www.zpanelcp.com/
Demo: http://zpanel.tk/
Documentation: http://www.zpanelcp.com/support/documentation/
ZPanel is a very nice control panel that got all the features you would expect to find in a web hosting control panel, there is a file manager, ftp account administration, MySQL database and user administration, a DNS/domain manager, and webmail(RoundCube).
It’s really quite feature packed and provides everything you would need for a personal website.,
I looked around a bit and found a zpanel provisioning module for WHMCS, a provisioning module is pretty much a “user buys hosting from you, then the software automatically sets up a user account on the zpanel server”-type thing, it is a third-party module and it haven’t been updated since 2012, but it might work… maybe.
It’s dead.
The documentation on the site is kind of lacking… This wouldn’t be my first choice for providing hosting to clients, but for a personal website on a VPS somewhere in the basement, it would work just fine.
Here is a theme that aims to make ZPanel look very much like the default CPanel theme:
Cpanel Theme for ZPanel
Also dead.
A very nice option for hobbyists who just want a quick and easy way to administer their website.
Not suited for my use case, but I’d use this for my own website if i didn’t have CPanel and only hosted this website.
Update: ZPanel seems to have been abandoned, but a new project called Sentora is being developed by the original team and based on ZPanel, it might be something to checkout as an alternative.
ISPConfig 3
Website: http://www.ispconfig.org/
Demo: http://www.ispconfig.org/page/en/ispconfig/online-demo.html
Documentation: http://www.ispconfig.org/page/en/documentation.html
ISP config 3 is kind of a massive beast, I think it has pretty much every feature you would ever need when administrating your hosting, it offers 4 user levels which range from:
- Admin
- Can configure the server and administer all users
- Control Panel Users
- A “Control Panel” user is pretty much a customizable user that has access to ONLY what the administrator specifies, you could for example configure this to only have access to the file manager or to only administer mailboxes.
- Resellers
- Resellers are what you would expect, they are allowed to resell a set amount of resources that is allocated to them by the admin, resellers can then create their own packages and resell them.
- Clients
- Clients can use resources that the reseller has assigned them or they can use whatever the administrator has allowed them to, its pretty much fully customizable.
ISPConfig is a very feature rich control panel and does so many things that it can get kind of overwhelming for new and inexperienced users, that they’ve got a 300 page manual should be all that is needed to say about that.
But everything that can be done with CPanel can be done with ISPConfig 3 it seems, this is pretty much the ultimate free control panel.
Although I did find that it’s sort of unnecessarily difficult and tedious to install, there is no single command auto-install, you have to do everything half-manually, I’m not a fan of that approach, but if you like that sort of thing, ISPConfig 3 is perfect for you.
There are a few unofficial and unsupported auto-install scripts made by various members of the community, they might be something to look at if you’re like me and prefer that the system install itself.
Honorable Mention
These are cool control panels that does not fit into the category of web hosting control panel, but they might be something you want to look into for server administration.
Ajenti
Website: http://ajenti.org
Documentation: http://support.ajenti.org/
the most visually pleasing of the bunch in my opinion although I find it a little bit too complicated, as i don’t really understand what half of the options mean, but I’ll cut it some slack since it’s not built to be a web hosting control panel.
It’s a server administration control panel, although it has a plugin called Ajenti V that adds website management functionality, i found it to be very lacking and way too complicated to use, BUT, it’s still in its infancy, i’m sure its going to be great in a couple of months/years.
Summary
And that is the top 5 CPanel alternatives that I could find and that I thought were the best ones for my specific use case, your list might look different, but it’s all subjective, I chose to not rank any of them by numbers as i think those kinds of lists are silly and clickbaity.
I hope this post helped you find some alternatives to CPanel, and I hope I somewhat inspired you to download some of these and try them out on a local server or on a Digital Ocean droplet.
Like and share my blog if you liked what you read :)
Helge, I’d like to hear what you think about Centos Web Panel and Sentora. Sentora is a fork of Zpanel and centos looks amazing.
I’ve unfortunately not tried any of those, although I took a peak at Centos web panel and I liked what I saw.
Be sure to let me know what you think about those as well!
Im using it for more than 8 months and till now is great. Although it seems to have some issues with the BIND server and about the Exim mail server, but the version of Centos i was using was like the same using full lamp stact as in the case of VestaCP and it didnt let receive any emails. Till now it rocks.
Thank you for this great post and information.
Klajdi Toci
Hosting Albania
Most mail server problems come down to DNS configuration make sure you have the following setup in dns
MX Record
Reverse DNS (PTR)
SPF (Sender Policy Framework)
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail)
I have try both of it, and still use both of it. here my opinion for both of it.
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PLUS Side CWP: Great Administration and system configuration from Web UI, you can swith PHP version or apache proxy nginx / varnish, this really improve your webserver. And it have system security.
MINUS Side CWP: Lack of documentation, and no good support for free/community, what i don’t like from CWP, if we came to their forum and asking for help, most of them always say “Contact Support” and when we try to contact the Support, they ask for price.
Overall CWP: It really good for you who was really advance in system administration on centos.
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PLUS Side Sentora: Great support at Community Forum. most of my problem always solve from forum, and their official support really help community with a good answer. The panel running with good and perfect.
MINUS Side Sentora: Really basic system administration, and only run Apache with single PHP version (Yes we can costumize that, but need work to do). It doesn’t come with security since it really basic, we must secure our own server.
Overall Sentora: It a good free open source, you can try this if you feel new on “system admin” world. And i really recommended Sentora for first Entry Level.
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Zpanel is so far the best and free alternative to Cpanel. Its ability to look exactly the same as cpanel makes it more reliable and easier for new users or users with Cpanel as their previous hosting choice.
Hi Helge,
Thanks for this write-up. In case you update this article or write a follow-up, I’d appreciate your consideration and review of my company’s cPanel alternative, ServerPilot.
https://serverpilot.io/
We have a free plan that does everything people need to host PHP sites on their own servers. Our paid plans include extra features such as monitoring and SSL deployment.
A fundamental difference with cPanel is that ServerPilot only focuses only on hosting websites, not on hosting mail or DNS.
I’d be happy to answer any questions. Feel free to send me an email.
Thanks!
Justin
Thank you so Justin Samuel , I need a c panel with free of cost , and you are great , And my salute to Boss Helge !
I have updated my article to add ServerPilot, I am testing it myself and it seems nice, hope they add more features though.
Hi Helge. Thanks for testing out ServerPilot and for adding it to your article. We try to be very careful with which features we add and how we develop them so that we don’t complicate the user experience and don’t introduce bugs. That said, we certainly will continue adding features. Don’t hesitate to send us feature requests.
Some sort of database management tool would be nice, maybe a “web interface” for apt-get?
and obviously a realtime fancy graph of network, cpu and disk usage c;
Thanks for these suggestions. We do have server cpu/memory/bandwidth graphs on the paid plans as well as current disk stats. We’re definitely considering more of these stats and monitoring features. A database manager is something we’ve been discussing and debating for quite some time. We still aren’t certain a database manager is something we should implement ourselves versus just making it easier to install phpMyAdmin.
A web based package manager would be a very nice addition as well.
Possibly a simple file manager too, although I get that you are targeting developers who usually use SSH anyways, it’s a nice option if you just have to quickly delete or upload a file and don’t have access to SSH or ftp.
Hi. There’s a small typo in the article. In the ServerPilot section, it should say Ubuntu 14.04 is the latest LTS release rather than Ubuntu 10.04. Thanks!
Ooops, thanks, fixed :)
but the price really high , 10$ :(
my vps price 30$/y
cpanel 12$/m better than serverpilot.io 10$/m
best price for paid serverpilot.io is 20$/y
or please make one payment life time :) like 50$
surprised not seeing a mention of virtualmin here.
Add Froxlor to this List.
It’s first on the list…
Hey! Just looking around and it seems that everyone has zpanel to sentora. It looks like quite an interesting project!
Just checked out Sentora and it looks promising, I need to play a little bit more with it though, thanks for mentioning it! :)mentioning it! :)
ISPconfig truly is a beast: you mentioned 4 levels of access – and there is fifth: when logging in with your webmail account – you get settings to your webmail, such as change password, and stuff… also: methinks it’s the only one in a bunch that can change virtual-host name(website name) without breaking a sweat: also, it can cluster….
…we are running this one on our servers for 4+ years, on 6 servers – sometimes we stumble upon a bug, but there are patches.
Maybe I can agree that it could look better, but – it works ;)
I am thinking to switch to cloud VPS where I could install any of these control panels. My choice has come down to kloxo and sentora.
Hey man, Just wanted to drop a message about that dick that stole your photo and never gave credit. It’s not cool on his part to do that. Anytime on my site I use images, they are always either CC images or if I do use someone’s work I always make sure to give credit to the owner with a link and caption stating where I got it.
Also, great blog and article. If you ever wanted to support each other with an ad of your site on my site and vice versa, I would be happy to. :)
Keep writing friend,
Zach
Hey, thanks mate, never cool when someone steals your work.
I don’t usually put ads on my website, other than the affiliate links I have linking to various services I personally use, maybe sometime in the future, I’ll keep it in mind though :)
Has any body tested CentOS webpanel? Is it a good alternative to cPanel/WHM?
I’ve tried it, i found it a little complicated compared to some of the other free panels, infact i’ve tried them all pretty much and i always seem to end up back using webuzo for some reason :P
If Webuzo ever got around to adding multi-user as a feature it would be my pick for an alternative to cpanel.
Webuzo is a great tool with pretty much everything under the hood but their development when it comes to including new features takes them forever to implement.
I liked Ajenti Most. The only limitation with this that you cannot creat further clients in it. If you are the only who want to use resources then this is the best option. Other wise Zpanel is good.
Hello, Great article. I’m using MAMP on my Mac. Do you recommend any control panels? or is MAMP enough….
For local development, you don’t really need anything other than MAMP/XAMPP.
Hey guys, what would you suggest to use on a VPS for simple WP hosting of 4-5 sites? I’m not a Linux pro and don’t have time to configure a server so I was using ServerPilot, but it doesn’t support OpenVZ…
I would suggest using a managed VPS or purchase server management from a good service provider. Unless you are willing to learn how to setup a linux server and have the time to properly configure a server it’s in your best to have someone else manage these processes for you. Even with any of these control panels there is some level of server configuration that takes place on the part of the server administrator. Trust me for your own security and the security of your clients information you will be better off going with a managed hosting provider until you have time and experience with configuring a Linux server.
http://centos-webpanel.com
This one you need to try ;)
Greatings from Hamar
It seems that every year I find myself looking at the great pricing of DigitalOcean and Linode and then next thing I know I’m searching for “cPanel Alternatives”! I’m currently on a “fully managed” VPS for $120 a month. I feel like I could get more bang for my buck by moving to DO or Linode and doing basic management myself.
… that said, the thought of setting up a hosting environment with all the bells / whistles that I currently have (WHM, cPanel, Softaculous, email, etc.) and then moving all my reseller and hosting accounts from cPanel to something else is so daunting!
At the end of the day I end up just settling back to paying my monthly $120 and avoiding the headache of setting up a new system and moving everything.
I wish I had a better alternative and an easy way to migrate all my sites, email, users, DBs, etc. etc. etc.
Hi Helge,
Thank you for the lists, i have plan to replace cPanel with free alternative and find compare of available of them to make good choice.
just found this today – not free, a paid app for OSX to manage web servers, an alternative to existing control panel softwares you install on your Unix based servers for web hosting.
Installed all u need: Apache, php, mysql, ftp, domains and emails – a but basic comparing to the rest but does the job
http://gopanel.io
Hi Helge,
The content of this page is very helpful for us as we are considering to install the web hosting infrastructure on our own root servers, not on infrastructure provided by webhosting providers. We would like to thank you for this great article.
Kind regards,
Ridli-Web Team
I really like ServerPilot
Does anyone know any other alternatives to it that allows you to 1 click wordpress sites and do it multiple times?
Hi Helge,
We developed our own a few years back because of the cost of Cpanel and because we’re not dollar based the exchange rate killed us!
We developed it to the point where we thought we’d release it as a product in its own right. Its not free, but it does have a free version.
The free version is not limited in terms of features. It is limited by the number of web hosting accounts you can set up (20). So it is free folks who manage a handful of sites.
It has the features you’d expect, including spam assassin settings, DNS, firewall, one click wordpress installer, etc.
I won’t post the link in this text. You can add it if you think its useful to your visitors
wow thats a nice list of cpanel alternatives
Man, this helped me a lot. Thank you for writing.
Can you please let me know what is the best web admin software to password-protect Apache directories ?
You can probably just use an htpasswd file, you can read about it in more detail here: http://www.htaccesstools.com/articles/htpasswd/
Thsi is awesome, I was finding some alternatives to the cpanel and i found your blog.
I just wanted to say thank you for writing this post.
You’re welcome :)
Hello, for everyone is still searching, checkout our solution. We have free access too. https://runcloud.io
Having been a server ‘hobbyist’ for several years, I’ve tried and tested many open source cpanel alternatives, and they all lack something somewhere. But here are some things I’ve found out:
Imscp is a great control panel for it’s simplicity, and has been my most used control panel. http://imscp.net
Kloxo is dead as is hypervm, but Mustafa Ramadam has enthusiastically maintained a forked version ccalled KloxoMR. The original Kloxo gained notoriety due to a load of users being hacked, which led to it becoming an open source/free panel. It’s never been proven that Kloxo was at fault, but the mud stuck.
I have tried KloxMR and found it great but hard to set up, but MR provides rapid assistance through his support forum and I’ve found him to be very helpful.
Centos do a great control panel for free, Centos Panel or CWP. It installs easily and has a nice clean interface.
The downside of all open source panels is the lack of user accessories such as billing software that also manages account creation and suspension. Another peculiarity is that cpanels file manager (and KloxoMR’s) takes you straight into your files without logging in, where every other panel requires username. password etc. No big deal but a slight inconvenience which actually makes the panel seem ‘ugly’ or amateur, hashed together. I don’t understand why software developers fail to see the benefits of integrating a filemanager, nor why it is always over-looked.
I have my doubts about Sentora, and have noticed a couple of other comments in the past that seem to confirm my suspicions that the developers have created a back door. Of course I can’t be sure, but it often pays to start an arguement on their forums to upset them, then notice how quickly your server goes down!
Another good panel is EHCP, easy hosting control panel which again installs easily. A good enthusiastic team of developers too.
thank you for this list, I’d deploy a VPS for my website and still confusing to manage it…, this list Help me.. and now i’m using ajenti… thankyou once again
Thank you for this article :)
How about webuzo? do you have any experience or review about it? Hard to find a review but webuzo is really popular in my country.
And bout serverpilot security can be trust? I want to move to VPS and IT with good skill cost $50 in Indonesia, so serverpilot much cheaper only $10/month.
I am new to webhosting but I am interest in self host but now not for commercial purpose, but for experimental and reference to young generation in my locality so that we can build solid community which will really work towards achieving the said goal, but any other recommendation will really be helpful to me as a novice in server administration.
Thank you for doing great job, so far I had downloaded Zpanel for windows to start with.