Free alternative for cPanel, DirectAdmin or Plesk?

There are a lot of paid control panels like cPanel DirectAdmin and Plaski in the market and web developers and system admins have the experience of working with at least one of them in their career, whether a shared hosting environment, a dedicated server or a VPS.

They have different features and different licensing prices, but in most cases, they are a must for hosting your web applications. You definitely don’t want to install a web server, database, dns, ftp, mail server and everything else all by yourself in the terminal and manage and monitor them manually. But is there a free web control panel with decent features that can replace these paid control panels, and can you really count on it? let’s review the available options.

Why do you need a control panel in the first place? A web server control panel is an online interface that allows you to control different aspects of your web server. Control panels are designed and implemented so that making changes on web servers become simpler and easier for users of all skill levels to work with.

For example, if you want to install a SSL certificate, set up ftp, make changes to your dns or your mail server, you can do all these through the control panel associated with your web server, because it’s not very convenient to use putty or remote desktop every time that you want to make changes, unless you’re a geek with a lot of free time! If you are using a shared hosting environment, you may not have the access to the terminal for security reasons.

What are the most important features that control panels like cPanel and DirectAdmin have? They install and configure the important software packages for you, whether from package managers or directly from source.

They also let you choose the versions. They install a web server, database server and also the client, mail server, dns server, ftp server and much more. You have the option to include all of them or not.

They create the hosting accounts and also other users for ftp, database and mail server and determine your resource limits like the disk space and the bandwidth. They also let you create reseller accounts and connect to a billing software. They let you configure the domains, DNSrecords, SSL certificates, email accounts, spam filters and also IP addresses. There is a simple interface for full or partial backups and also scheduling backups and restores. They manage services and create log files.

They also monitor log files for important messages and abuses like brute force attacks. They can also be integrated with firewall softwares.

They let you manage cron jobs very easily. They have a clear, responsive and multi-language interface and their functionality can be extended using plugins. They are actively maintained and updated.

They have an active community. Why do you need a free alternative? Free is always better, right? Actually NO! Paid control panels like cPanel, DirectAdmin and Plesk are very mature and well maintained.

They have a lot of features to offer and most of their bugs and security holes are resolved over the years. They are the better and obvious choice, but not all the time.

Sometimes a free option can do the job without the hassles of acquiring a license for your operating system and the IP address. Nowadays you can deploy a new cloud server for testing and dev purposes in a minute or so, then why wait for a license or even pay for it, if there is a free option with all the needed features.

A free control panel may not have all the features that a paid one is offering, but they can do the job and sometimes they have some features that the paid options don’t have.

For example, if you need a web server for only hosting your static assets on a CDN or a server for storing your backups, buying a paid control panel like cPanel can be an overkill. Enough talking, what is this free control panel? If you search in the Google, you can definitely find more than one option, but not all of them are actually good.

The decent ones that you can trust, and test are CWP and ISPConfig. Which one has the more features?

It’s CWP or the CentOS Web Panel. You can find the links in the description, so let’s review their features and get more technical. CentOS Web Panel is a free Linux web hosting control panel. As the name suggests, it can only be installed on the CentOS distro. It shouldn’t be a major problem as CentOS is a popular choice for web servers, but if you want to stick to another Linux flavor, you have to try the other mentioned option, ISPConfig.

Because CWP is designed for CentOS, the installation is pretty straightforward and fast. You just need a fresh OS, and it installs the pre-compiled packages. You can also manage your operating system with CWP later on.

CWP is free, but there is a pro version which is paid with professional support. The free version is packed with features and looks like an enterprise solution.

The paid version is also super cheap you can go pro for just $1.49 per month or almost 12 dollar per year. It’s almost like a donation! Let’s explore the CWP features: CWP installs some pre-compiled packages upon installation, and you can completely change them after the installation from the control panel itself. It’s a different approach in comparison with others like cPanel and DirectAdmin, but results in a much faster and easier installation and you can configure everything from the panel itself, rather than the terminal interface.

It installs a full LAMP with Apache, PHP 5.6, MySQL and phpMyAdmin and then you can log into the admin area with your root user and manage everything. You have a lot of options for the web server. You can install Nginx or use it as a reverse proxy to apache. You can also choose Litespeed or use Varnish for caching. You can also compile apache from source and load additional modules, enable Mod Security and bunch of other security features.

You can install any version of PHP that you want, compile it from source and load the required modules. It lets you install modules very easily, even the ones like ffmpeg or Ion cube. If you go pro, you can use the php selector and use different php versions per user and also per-folder. You have all the basic stuffs for managing users, IP addresses, email, FTP, DNS, database, SSL and also Auto SSL with free let’s encrypt certificates.

The backup manager is great. You can schedule daily, weekly, or monthly backup on your local storage or a remote server.

There are a lot of informative pages for your software and hardware, and you can do live monitoring too. CWP offers some other cool features that most of the page control panels like cPanel and DirectAdmin lack, for example you can install and manage a MongoDB, which is a popular NoSQL database. You can watch another Tech Debate about MongoDB if you want to learn more about it or the NoSQL itself.

CWP also has an online terminal emulator, a root file manager, supports PostgreSQL and also phppgadmin and other tools to manage your operating system. With CWP most of the times we don’t need to shell access to manage things.

You can change the network configs, update Linux packages, tune the system parameters, change hostname and a lot more right from the control panel. In terms of security, CWP can install and manage CSF firewall. You can use COMODO and OWASP rule-sets with your ModSecurity with the one click installer.

CWP also takes care of two automatic updates. You can also use the ClamAV antivirus and Spamassassin for the emails. There are other security measures for denial of services protection, Cloud Linux and CageFS support for the shell users, IP address control and many more. CWP takes security very seriously and you have a lot of options in terms of security which you can turn on and configure. The list of features goes on and on.

It requires a complete one-hour review, but overall, you will be pleased.

You may start thinking, you don’t need cPanel after a while! It even provides a migration tool for cPanel users, if they have that feeling and think that the migration is a hassle. You can extend the functionality with third-party softwares like Cloud Linux, Softaculous and Litespeed Enterprise. There is an API for easier account management and also WHMCS billing integration.

You can easily use CWP on your dedicated server and start selling web hosts. It can also be installed on an NATed machine. You can test it using the online demo, but the data and configs are not persistent, as expected, and are wiped every hour. So, it is much better if you can test it on your server. These days you can deploy a cloud server for a limited time and start testing it.

You can also find installation instructions on the site. It’s very easy and requires running a few commands and the rest can be done from the admin area itself.

You can also check the system requirements too. As you can see, you can even install it on a server with a gigabyte of ram. If you have any questions, you can check the wiki, write on the forum or contact the support.

ISPConfig is a free and open-source control panel with over 40 000 downloads per month. It also offers enterprise supports. You can manage one or more servers from the control panel. Unlike CWP, you can install it on many Linux distributions like Debian, Ubuntu, fedora and CentOS. The recommended ones are Debian and Ubuntu server[edition].

You can find a lot of installation instructions at howtoforge.com. It is translated into more than 20 languages, has four access levels for admins, resellers, users and email clients. The software selection is more limited compared to CWP. You can only install Apache 2 or Nginx as your web server, so no Nginx reverse proxy, Litespeed or Varnish caching options here.

It manages a lot of services, but in comparison to CWP, it has less features, but you have the important ones like SSL, AutoSSL, FTP, MySQL, DNS, Cronjobs, email and more. Let’s review the services and functions that it is providing in detail. As you can see, it has Webalizer and AWStats for providing and visualizing the metrics. The available PHP modes for Apache are mod_php, FCGI, CGI, hhvm or suphp and for Nginx it’s php_fpm or the hip-hop virtual machine.

You can have individual php settings per website and these are the features that are not available in the free version of CWP. If you install Apache, you can have ruby or python too. You can have jailed or non-jailed shell users and also you can use dkim or dmarc for the emails. It has a billing module too, but it is paid, and you have to buy it. You can try the online demo to see the different user areas.

If you like this control panel, you can also donate to support the development of ISPConfig and get the user manual. The user interface is not that modern compared to the other control panels, but it does its job very decently. One of the big cons of ISPConfig is the lack of a file manager. You have to use a ftp clients and it’s not convenient all the times, especially if you want to upload a zip archive and unpack it on the server. You should note that the online demo is on a test server and it’s not that fast.

It is recommended that you install it on your server and then do the final evaluation. These control panels are free, but don’t forget to donate to support the continuous development of them. You can also report bugs and suggest new features to help them grow more. Having free options means more flexibility, when it is needed! That’s it for now, if you like this video, don’t forget to hit the thumbs up.

If there is any other free control panel that you are using, you can include it in the comments.