How much has changed in cPanel? I used it to find out.

cPanel might still be one of the most popular hosting panels but with other options available with more features at a lower cost it could only be a matter of time before its dominance falls.

Operating system support: AlmaLinux, CloudLinux, Rocky Linux and Ubuntu

Portability to different platforms

cPanel is probably one of the most popular admin panels, so it’s no surprise that it’s supported by many hosts. They also include migration tools to migrate between servers and even from a Plesk control panel. Since cPanel is so popular, most alternative admin panels have a migrato,r meaning that if you decide cPanel isn’t for you, you can still easily switch to other admin panels such as Plex or sPanel.

Instead of charging by website, cPanel offers unlimited websites and chargers based on the number of users you have. If you’re planning on hosting a lot of websites, but all for your own use, then it can make it slightly cheaper, although not as cheap as SPanel. However, if you plan on hosting just a few websites or having lots of user accounts, then it will be more expensive than the alternatives. Reselling is available for their plans starting at 46.99/mo, making it slightly cheaper than Plesk for reselling.

Ease of use

cPanel’s ease of use is a mixed bag. It has areas that can be a little daunting for new users, but once you’re familiar with it, it becomes pretty easy to work out where things are. There’s no mobile-specific app, but that’s not required since the web version works well on mobile. The server admin part of cPanel is a lot more daunting than the individual website management section, and the server admin part definitely feels like it would be daunting to non-technical users - although it is nice to have the additional flexibility you get from exposing the raw, technical, internals. The beauty of cPanel’s popularity is that there are plenty of tutorials and videos you can watch if you’re not quite sure how to do something.

Support

Web server support

Nginx is supported via free plugins and some command line dabbling, but we’d expect to see a server as popular as Nginx to be supported out of the box. Lightspeed is available but that is a commercial application and requires an eye-watering $25/month license. It would be nice to see support for the free alternative OpenLightSpeed, which is available in sPanel. Overall, cPanel doesn’t offer the breadth of web server support that Plesk does, and it doesn’t provide the performance-optimized web server support that sPanel offers. It does offer clustering, meaning you can join multiple servers together and split the load between them, but that’s quite an advanced feature and not something the vast majority of users will need.

Database support

Supports both MySQL/MariaDB out of the box. Postgres is supported but involves running a command line script, which, again, isn’t ideal for less-technical users - although once it’s installed, then the user interface has very good support for it.

Language support

Supports PHP, Java, and Ruby out of the box, with support for more if you’re willing to install and manage them yourself. We’d expect a mature admin panel such as cPanel to support many more languages.

Backups

Supports offsite backups. Has a good selection of remote backup providers: S3, BackBlaze, FTP, Google Drive, Rsync and WebDAV.

Extensions and apps

Supports Softaculous. It also has a number of paid extensions but nothing that isn’t supported by Plesk. It is very extensible if you’re willing to dabble with the command line, and there’s lots of documentation provided on how to tweak things, but really, an admin panel as mature and expensive as cPanel should have more click-and-play extensions to justify its cost.

Security

Clam AV virus scanner, which is a good virus scanner, with support for more advanced ones such as ImunifyAV (at a cost). 2 factor auth, which is good. Automatic updates are an additional $3/month. This includes ModSecurity as a web application firewall, which I personally trust over an AI solution.

Final verdict

Hosting has changed a lot in the last decade, with new performance-focused web servers, advanced databases and powerful new languages becoming increasingly popular. Unfortunately, cPanel has done little to keep up with these advances, supporting pretty much the same setup it has for the last decade or more. Whilst there is plenty of documentation covering how to install these newer alternatives, it’s really something that cPanel should be supporting out of the box by now. Given the increase in pricing cPanel has seen over the years, it costs just as much as considerably better alternatives such as Plesk. cPanel is historically a very popular and well-known admin panel, so it will be familiar to a lot of seasoned hosters and, despite its shortcomings, its familiarity is often enough to make it people’s go-to admin panel. The bottom line is: unless you already feel most comfortable in cPanel or you plan on reselling, there’s no real reason to choose it over sPanel or Plesk.