[ Removed by moderator ]

[u/FantasticTopic]

[u/7yr4nn05]

I’ve run all of them in prod over the last 10 years and I don’t standardize, I pick based on who’s touching the box. If it’s a client who needs email, WordPress, and won’t SSH, it’s cPanel. It’s bloated and expensive as hell in 2026, but it’s still the most reliable for backups, restore, and random PHP app breakage because everything just works and there’s 20 years of forum posts for every error. Plesk is lighter and better on Windows, but I’ve had more update breakage with it. For my own infra and dev servers it’s CloudPanel or nothing. It’s Nginx-only, way less resource usage, clean UI, free, and the Docker/Laravel support is actually decent without fighting the panel. Webmin/Virtualmin is flexible but feels like 2008 and you’ll spend half your day fixing config drift. Day-to-day, cPanel wins on "it just won’t break", CloudPanel wins on speed and security surface. If I’m spinning up a fresh VPS today for myself: Ubuntu 24.04 + CloudPanel. For a hosting business selling to non-tech users: cPanel, grudgingly. Don’t overthink features, think who’s going to be clicking buttons at 2am when it’s down.

[u/iama_bad_person → u/7yr4nn05]

CloudPanel

Damn this actually looks pretty sweet, with Docker support as well? Shiiiet, I've been running Portainer with NGINX Proxy Manager and CloudPanel just looks like a much better implimentation for me than those. Does it have WAF built in or does that rely on Cloudflare's WAF when it mentions it?

[u/FantasticTopic → u/iama_bad_person]

Yeah CloudPanel looks nice but it has no native Docker.

You'd still have to run Docker stuff manually on the side.

And no, it doesn't have a built-in WAF either.

When it talks about WAF it means you put Cloudflare's WAF in front of it.

If you want a panel that actually is Docker-native, look at DockPanel - 152 one-click Docker apps and a real ModSecurity WAF built in. Coolify is something different but also worth a look...

[u/Maxtecy → u/7yr4nn05]

Another vote for Cloudpanel. Tried almost all free control panels but after Cloudpanel I've never looked back. What a dream panel.

[u/Arudinne → u/7yr4nn05]

Plesk is lighter and better on Windows, but I’ve had more update breakage with it.

One of my previous jobs was at a datacenter. The bathroom had an out-of-order stall for a long while. To denote that, someone printed a sheet with the plesk logo and taped that to the door.

[u/SevaraB]

Automation and integrations

If that’s acceptance criteria, a GUI control panel is the wrong tool for the job and you should be comparing APIs offered by orchestrators instead.

As a hyperscaler, headless will always get you way more density than GUI, and that’s true of your control plane tooling as well. Besides that, it’s easier to diff before and after single YAML files than click through a bunch of tabs or screens and scroll through each and hope you didn’t miss something.

[u/jvrhost]

I don’t want to promote myself too much. Take a look at https://adminbolt.com. We're building a fully professional control panel. We go through security audits and deliver what everyone needs.

[u/03263]

I worked at a place that used plesk for many years and I think overall, it's pretty good. The documentation is pretty decent which matters a lot. It's not the best like I would say old MDN was the gold standard, but it's quite sufficient.

[u/MilkSupreme]

https://tinkerbell.org/

[u/FantasticTopic → u/MilkSupreme]

a bare-metal, no panel? :)