cPanel vs Plesk
In the past decade Web hosting management software have become the go-to way for a huge number of businesses to get websites online in a simple way. For many webhosts, there is just no need to run a custom database server, a custom nameserver, a custom webserver. Bundling all of the essentials of webhosting in one package allows for both a simpler experience and powerful operations that just aren’t possible on distributed setups. As part of this transition to all-in-one platforms, two names have come out on top: Plesk and cPanel – so what are they, and which should you use?
History
cPanel
cPanel has been developed by cPanel, L.L.C., a privately owned corporation headquartered in Houston, Texas, United States. It was originally designed in 1996 as the control panel for Speed Hosting, a now-defunct web hosting company. The original author of cPanel, John Nick Koston, had a stake in Speed Hosting. Webking quickly began using cPanel after their merger with Speed Hosting. The new company moved their servers to Virtual Development Inc. (VDI), a now-defunct hosting facility. Following an agreement between Koston and VDI, cPanel was only available to customers hosted directly at VDI. At the time there was little competition in the control panel market, with the main choices being VDI and Alabanza.
Plesk
Plesk was founded in 2000 by Dimitri Simonenko when Rackspace became Plesk’s first customer. Two decades after its first release, Plesk software operates on more than 370,000+ servers globally, supporting the operations of more than 12 million websites and 15 million email boxes for customers in 230 countries. One of Plesk’s leading extensions, the popular WordPress Toolkit, is live on over 4.6 million instances, and a further 161 extensions are available on the Plesk catalog.
Interface
- It’s a platform that’s more common among many hosting providers and is usually cheaper for the end-user.
- It allows you to set up free SSL certificates via Let’s Encrypt (AutoSSL), but you can also switch to Comodo or other certificates.
- Great automatic backups and restorations. You can take advantage of a couple of built-in back-ups and restore mechanisms.
- You can run Plesk on Windows and more than a dozen Linux distributions including versions of Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CloudLinux, and Virtuozzo Linux.
- Built-in support for Docker, Git, Node.js, and WordPress Toolkit (great if you want to implement some WordPress automation and get additional management features).
- Easy SSL integration with a single click. Plesk will take care of obtaining an SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt and integrating it into your sites.
- WordPress users can take advantage of automatic updates, bug fixes, and patches. In other words, Plesk takes care of most of your WordPress security needs.
Summary
| Features | cPanel | Plesk |
|---|---|---|
| Supported O.S's | CentOS, CloudLinux, Almalinux, RHEL | Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL, Cloudlinux, Virtuozzo, Windows |
| Webserver | Apache (EasyApache 4) | Apache, NGINX, IIS |
| Mail server | Dovecot | Postfix, MailEnable, SmarterMail, IceWarp Mail Server |
| DNS server | BIND, MyDNS, PowerDNS, NSD | BIND, Microsoft DNS Server, Simple DNS Plus |
| Stats | Webalizer, AWStats | Webalizer, AWStats, SmarterStats |
| Scripting | PHP, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Perl, Python | Perl, Python, PHP 5.2–7.1, Apache Tomcat, ASP.NET |
| Databases | MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB | MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, Microsoft SQL Server |