Introduction
Our introduction to cPanel and Plesk alternatives discussed the main VPS hosting control panels and what each one offers. Now, we’ll help you choose between them. You’ll finish with a shortlist of control panels to try out on a test server before you move any real sites. Later in the series, we’ll show you exactly how to install each one.
The first step is to take stock of what you currently use.
Step 1 — List What You’re Moving
Start with your current hosting, because your new control panel needs to handle everything you use there. Log in to your current control panel and note down:
- Websites. How many do you have, and what do they run? Note anything that isn’t running on PHP, such as a Node.js or Python app.
- Hosting accounts and logins. Who logs in to manage your sites today? Is it just you, or do you have clients or colleagues each with their own logins?
- Email. How many mailboxes do you have? Are they on your current hosting, or are they with a separate email provider? If they’re on your hosting, it may be best to move them to a hosted email service such as STWmail rather than onto the VPS, because a mail server needs constant care to keep its messages out of spam folders.
- DNS. Where are your domain’s DNS records managed? Most control panels can run their own DNS server, but your records can stay where they are, with an A record pointing each site at the VPS.
- Extras. Note cron jobs (scheduled tasks), SSH access, staging sites, and anything else you’d miss if it disappeared.
Step 2 — Match Panels to Your Needs
Every VPS owner wants something a little different from their server. Read the sections below that sound like you, as they’ll point you to the control panels that can support your requirements.
You want a company to call when the panel breaks
Sooner or later, something will break that isn’t your website’s fault. It might be a panel update failing halfway or a service refusing to start after a reboot. On a free control panel, you typically post on a forum and wait for someone to answer, which can be less than ideal. With a paid license, you open a ticket and a support team has to look at it.
cPanel, Plesk, and DirectAdmin all include support with the license. cPanel and Plesk support often comes through whoever sold you the license, and DirectAdmin’s cheapest license only covers help with installation.
Several free control panels offer paid support or access to priority help:
- ISPConfig offers business support from its developers.
- CyberPanel answers tickets for free, but gives priority to customers who buy its add-ons or licenses.
- OpenPanel includes ticket support in its paid Enterprise edition.
- Froxlor has a paid support service run by its lead developer.
HestiaCP has no paid option, and neither does CloudPanel on your own server. With those two, the documentation and forums are all you have, so they suit people who can work through a fix on the command line.
You’re happy to pay for a license
Of the paid control panels covered in this series, cPanel, Plesk, and DirectAdmin differ mainly in how they charge and what their cheaper editions leave out.
- cPanel is the control panel hosting companies offer most often, so it’s the interface your users are most likely to recognize. Its license includes WP Toolkit with Smart Updates. But cPanel charges per hosting account, so each person who needs their own login moves you toward the next price tier.
- Plesk prices its editions by how many domains each allows, so several sites of your own fit its cheapest edition, Web Admin. Our shared hosting runs Plesk, so if you’re moving your sites from STW shared hosting to a VPS, you already know the interface. But the Web Admin tier doesn’t include the ability to give clients their own logins, and only includes a limited version of WP Toolkit.
- DirectAdmin handles the same everyday jobs as cPanel for much less, including email, DNS, and WordPress installs. But it needs at least 4 GB of memory, more than most control panels here, and its cheapest license includes installation help only.
We can install cPanel or Plesk on a ServeTheWorld VPS on request.
You’d rather not pay a license fee
A free control panel takes the license off your monthly bill, but “free” can mean a few different deals.
- Free throughout. HestiaCP and CloudPanel have no paid edition or paid add-ons.
- Free, with paid extras. ISPConfig sells a migration tool and support, Froxlor sells support, and CyberPanel sells add-ons, including its WordPress Manager.
- Free for personal use. OpenPanel’s Community edition is meant for private use and caps you at three user accounts. Business hosting on OpenPanel means its paid Enterprise edition.
You host sites for clients
When you give each client their own login, they can manage their own sites without seeing anyone else’s. Many control panels also let you set limits for each account, such as disk space or the number of sites.
Most control panels can create separate client logins, including cPanel, DirectAdmin, ISPConfig, and most of the free options. OpenPanel’s free Community edition is the exception, because it’s meant for personal use, not client hosting.
Plesk’s VPS licenses come in three editions, and only the higher two tiers have client logins:
- Web Admin is for managing your own sites. It has no customer accounts, so every site sits under your administrator login.
- Web Pro adds customer accounts, so each client can log in and manage only their own sites.
- Web Host adds reseller accounts on top of that.
ISPConfig is a good option if you want a free control panel built around client accounts. It gives the administrator and each client separate logins, and the clients work within limits you set.
You sell hosting through resellers
Resellers sell your hosting to their own customers, so they need accounts that can create client accounts of their own. cPanel (through WHM), DirectAdmin, ISPConfig, and Froxlor all have reseller accounts. Plesk only has them in its top edition, Web Host.
Most of your sites run WordPress
Any control panel that runs PHP with a MySQL or MariaDB database can host WordPress. They differ in how much of the setup they do for you.
- CloudPanel and HestiaCP have free one-click installers that create the database and set up WordPress in one go.
- CyberPanel keeps its WordPress Manager for paying customers.
- ISPConfig and Froxlor have no installer, so you’d set up each site yourself.
A manual install of WordPress isn’t hard. You create a database and a database user, then upload WordPress and run its setup screen. Our guide to installing WordPress walks through the manual method, and although it’s written for shared hosting, the steps are the same on a VPS. After the first site, it’s routine.
CyberPanel can be worth those extra steps if you want page caching built into the web server. It runs OpenLiteSpeed, the web server the LiteSpeed Cache plugin is built for.
You rely on staging and tested updates
If you use WP Toolkit’s staging today, check what it will cost on a VPS. A staging copy lets you try changes before they go live. WP Toolkit’s Smart Updates feature goes a step further and tests plugin and theme updates on a copy before applying them.
cPanel includes WP Toolkit with Smart Updates, although your hosting provider may need to turn it on. Plesk sells Smart Updates as an extra.
None of the free control panels in this series combines staging and automated update testing without a paid add-on. On those, a staging plugin or a manual copy of the site can fill part of the gap, but you’ll check updates yourself, following a routine like the one in our guide to updating WordPress safely.
Happy to skip the server work? If WP Toolkit is the main thing you’d miss, a VPS may not be the right move. Our WordPress hosting runs WP Toolkit on Plesk, and we look after the server for you.
You run Node.js or Python apps
PHP sites run through the web server, but a Node.js or Python app runs as its own process. The web server passes visitors’ requests on to the app, an arrangement called a reverse proxy.
CloudPanel handles Node.js and Python as standard site types. It sets the language version and the reverse proxy for you. Keeping the app running is your job, though. CloudPanel’s guides have you install a process manager, such as PM2 for Node.js, to restart the app after a crash or reboot. The other free control panels here are built around PHP, so other languages mean setup outside the panel.
ASP.NET sites may need Windows. Newer ASP.NET Core apps can run on Linux, but older sites built on Microsoft’s .NET Framework need Windows Server, which our Windows VPS plans provide. Plesk is the only control panel in this series that runs on Windows as well as Linux.
If most of what you run is containers deployed from Git, a hosting control panel may not be the right tool at all. Our guide to deploying WordPress with Coolify shows a container-based alternative, and we’ll cover more of these platforms in a future series.
You’re moving sites from cPanel
Most control panels can import a cPanel account or backup, which saves rebuilding each site by hand.
- cPanel and Plesk. cPanel’s Transfer Tool copies accounts from another cPanel server, and Plesk Migrator can import from cPanel.
- DirectAdmin and CyberPanel. Both convert cPanel backups. On DirectAdmin, you run the conversion from the command line.
- HestiaCP. Its import command handles cPanel backups, but at the time of writing it doesn’t bring SSL certificates across or update DKIM email records.
- ISPConfig and OpenPanel. Both charge for importing. ISPConfig’s Migration Toolkit is a yearly subscription, and its cPanel support is still in beta. OpenPanel only imports in its Enterprise edition.
- CloudPanel and Froxlor. Neither has an importer, so you move each site by hand.
Treat an importer as a bonus. Part 11 walks through a manual migration that works with every control panel, and with only a few sites, the manual route is manageable.
You’d rather not chase updates
A control panel runs with full administrator access, so a flaw in the panel can expose the whole server. CISA, the US cybersecurity agency, lists flaws in cPanel & WHM, CyberPanel, Control Web Panel, and Webmin (the tool Virtualmin is built on) in its catalog of vulnerabilities known to have been exploited. When CyberPanel’s 2024 flaw was reported, its developers say they committed a fix within 30 minutes. Servers that hadn’t installed it, and whose panel login was open to the internet, were still compromised.
A fix only helps once it’s installed, so check how each control panel delivers updates:
- Updates itself. cPanel and Plesk can update themselves, and HestiaCP turns on automatic updates by default.
- Automatic once you enable it. OpenPanel can install updates automatically if you turn the setting on.
- Through system updates. If you install Froxlor from its Debian or Ubuntu package, it updates with the server’s normal packages, so it’s only as current as your system.
- A command you run yourself. ISPConfig, CyberPanel, and CloudPanel each have an update command. You’ll need to watch for new releases and put updates on your maintenance list.
cPanel, Plesk, and HestiaCP are good options if you’d rather updates arrived on their own.
You’re comfortable on the command line
Every control panel here needs some command-line work. You run the installer over SSH, and when an update fails or a service won’t start, the fix usually happens on the command line too, outside the panel.
If you’d rather stay in the browser most of the time, a control panel with paid support is a safer bet. When something breaks below the panel, a support team can find the cause and tell you what to run, instead of leaving you to piece it together from forum threads.
Step 3 — Pick the Panels to Test
Your list from Step 1 probably matches more than one of the needs above. Find the row closest to your setup.
| Your setup | Test first | Also worth a look | Usually a poor fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| A few WordPress sites for your own business, no license budget | CloudPanel or HestiaCP | CyberPanel (installing WordPress yourself) | ISPConfig, Froxlor |
| A few WordPress sites, and you rely on staging and tested updates | cPanel, or Plesk Web Pro or higher (Smart Updates costs extra) | CyberPanel paid add-ons, for staging and testing updates yourself | Froxlor |
| Client sites for an agency or freelancer, with paid support | cPanel or Plesk (Web Pro or higher, Web Host for resellers) | DirectAdmin (Lite or higher) | OpenPanel Community |
| Client sites, no license budget | ISPConfig | HestiaCP, Froxlor | OpenPanel Community |
| PHP sites plus Node.js or Python apps | CloudPanel | OpenPanel Enterprise | ISPConfig |
| ASP.NET sites built on .NET Framework | Plesk on a Windows VPS | None in this series | All the Linux-only control panels |
| A personal server to learn on | Froxlor | HestiaCP, OpenPanel Community | Sentora (its stable release needs an OS past standard support) |
Two or three control panels is plenty. Each one you test means another install and another round of checks, so pick the closest matches and leave the rest.
Before you test, check that your VPS can run each control panel on your shortlist. The table shows what each project publishes at the time of writing (October 2026). We run every install in this series on a VPS with 2 vCPUs, 4 GB of memory, and 120 GB of disk, which covers every memory and disk minimum here. DirectAdmin also needs 4 GB of swap, which you may need to add before installing.
| Control panel | Memory | Disk space | Operating systems |
|---|---|---|---|
| cPanel | 2 GB (4 GB recommended) | 20 GB (40 GB recommended) | AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, CloudLinux, Ubuntu (one LTS release at a time, not always the newest) |
| Plesk | 1 GB plus 1 GB swap on Linux, 2 GB on Windows | 20 GB on Linux, 32 GB on Windows | Ubuntu, Debian, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, CloudLinux, Windows Server |
| DirectAdmin | 4 GB, plus 4 GB swap | 2 GB free, plus your sites | Ubuntu, Debian, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux |
| HestiaCP | 1 GB without spam and virus filtering (4 GB recommended) | 10 GB (40 GB recommended) | Ubuntu, Debian |
| ISPConfig | Not published | Not published | Ubuntu, Debian, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux |
| CyberPanel | 1 GB | 10 GB | Ubuntu, AlmaLinux |
| CloudPanel | 2 GB | 10 GB | Ubuntu, Debian |
| OpenPanel | 1 GB (4 GB recommended) | 20 GB (50 GB recommended) | Ubuntu only on Community; Enterprise adds Debian, AlmaLinux, and Rocky Linux |
| Froxlor | Not published | Not published | Ubuntu, Debian |
| Sentora | 2 GB (4 GB recommended) | 20 GB (40 GB recommended) | Stable release: only Ubuntu and CentOS versions past standard support. New beta version: current Ubuntu and Debian |
Choose a current long-term support (LTS) release of an operating system the control panel supports. We use Ubuntu LTS throughout this series. Most installers also expect a fresh operating system, so if your VPS already hosts sites, plan to install the control panel on a new one. Allow more memory than the minimum if you’ll run a mail server, because spam and virus filtering use a lot of it.
Finally, check that each control panel offers PHP versions that still get security fixes. Our guide to updating PHP for WordPress explains how to move a site to a newer version safely.
Step 4 — Try Your Shortlist Before You Commit
A few hours on a test server shows you how a control panel handles your everyday jobs, and you won’t have to migrate your sites twice if your first choice doesn’t work out.
- Set up a test VPS. Choose a plan with enough memory, CPU, and disk for the control panel and a copy of one or two of your real sites. Take a snapshot of the fresh server before you install anything, so you can roll back between control panels.
- Install your first choice. cPanel offers a free trial for eligible IP addresses, and Plesk and OpenPanel’s Enterprise edition also offer free trials. Free control panels need no trial, although their license terms and edition limits still apply.
- Do the jobs you’ll do every week. Add a site, issue an SSL certificate, create a database, install WordPress if you use it, and add a second user if clients will log in. Check that certificates renew automatically. Let’s Encrypt is shortening its certificates from 90 days to 45, so renewal needs to be able to run without you.
- Test a backup and a restore. Set up a backup that goes off the server, then restore a site from it, so you know the restore works before you need it. CISA’s backup guidance recommends the 3-2-1 rule, which means three copies of your data, on two types of storage, with one copy kept offsite. For WordPress sites, a backup plugin gives you a second set of backups that doesn’t depend on the control panel. Our guide to backup plugins compares the options.
- Run an update. Find where the control panel tells you an update is available, and install one. If updates are a command you run yourself, practice it now, while nothing depends on the server.
Choose the control panel that made those jobs easiest, and that you’d be most comfortable troubleshooting if a site went down.
Conclusion
For most people moving a few sites off shared hosting, two questions narrow the field to two or three control panels. Will you pay for a license, and does anyone besides you need to log in? A few hours on a test server will then show which one you’d rather work with.
The following sections of the series show you how to install and set up each of these control panels, starting with HestiaCP.
Next steps: