Free Open Source cPanel Alternatives

Free Open Source cPanel Alternatives. A Web hosting control panel is a totally web-based interface which has capability to manage your web services under a single location.If you have ever bought or used shared web hosting space, you are probably familiar with cPanel. The purpose of a Web Hosting panel, such as cPanel, is to create a graphical user interface for basic web server maintenance tasks such as creating websites, databases and FTP accounts.The web hosting control panels provides a elegant solution to Linux newbies to host multiple websites on VPS(Virtual Private Servers) and Dedicated Servers.This kind of hosting panel offers easy to use management software’s to simplifies the process of handling servers without the need of expert knowledge of sever administration.

Luckily for us there are a number of open source (or otherwise free) web hosting panels. Unfortunately none of them quite measure up to the depth of cPanel, but the options are solid and great for server owners on a budget.

1. Sentora

Sentora is a fork of ZPanel. This fork happened after Zpanel’s sale to a United States-based company. Sentora brands itself as the “community version” of ZPanel. The team behind Sentora also offers subscription-based, premium support.



2. Vesta

Vesta is open source and aims to be a simple and lightweight web control panel. It does not support the more enterprise-like features (like multi-server setups), but it does try to place an emphasis on performance by using Nginx for the web panel frontend and Apache for the application backend.




3.KLOXO

Kloxo is a control panel made by LXCenter, the same people who created HyperVM, which is a popular virtual machine manager type thing that I’ve not researched very well and frankly don’t care about.

It’s interface is very similar and most likely inspired by CPanel, so if you really love CPanel’s interface, then this might be a good option for you, as far as I know there is also a script installer ala softaculus available for Kloxo, I have not tested it and do not know how well it works, but it’s there if you need or want it.

4. Virtualmin/Webmin

Virtualmin / Webmin is a software suite with a free version licensed under GPL. While it lacks the visual finesse of some of the other offerings, it is a power house of configurability. Not only is it the cadillac solution of free web panels, it is also has a nice feature allowing us to import websites from cPanel backups, allowing us to transfer our sites off a shared host to a VPS/Dedi with ease.

5. ISPconfig

ISPconfig is an open source multilingual control panel which enables you to manage multiple servers under one control panel. ISPConfig is licensed under the BSD license. This open source control panel is also capable of managing FTP, SQL , BIND DNS, Database and Virtual servers.

6. OpenPanel

OpenPanel is an open source web based control panel licensed under GNU General Public. It has an attractive and easy to use interface. It can manage Apache, AWStats, Bind DNS, PureFTPD, Postfix, MySQL databases,IPTables firewall and Courier-IMAP e-mails and more.

7. EHCP

EHCP (Easy Hosting Control Panel) is a free web hosting software for maintaining a web based hosting server. With the use of EHCP you can manage MySQL databases, email accounts, domain accounts, FTP accounts and much more.

It is the only control panel that has built-in support for Nginx and PHP-FPM with completely throw out Apacheand provides good performance for low end servers.

8. ispCP

ispCp is a free/open source project founded to built a multi server control and admin panel without any limitations. It is Linux/Unix based web hosting server which is featured with all functions you might expect from a professional hosting tool. ispCP allows you to manage all the server like domains, email accounts, FTP accounts, database on its own.

9. Webuzo

You may have already heard of Softaculous. Their primary software is a script deployment system that has hundreds of scripts in it (like blog software, forum software, online games, etc) and can be configured into cPanel. Webuzo is also their product. It is a free for personal use (single user) panel that has a remarkable likeness to cPanel.

The free software is offered and has a version of Softaculous included in that has a small portion of the available scripts. ie: Their goal here is to get people on their platform with the free software and then get them to upgrade to a full version of Softaculous after getting them hooked on the script deployer, The panel is quite obviously focused on script deployment, but that can be overlooked and just use the web admin panel for what it is.

10. VHCS

VHCS is also an open source web based interface control panel for Linux especially designed for ITprofessionals and hosting service providers. VHCS is written in PHP, Perl and C, which gives you full control over resellers, end user. Within a minute you can configure your servers, create user with domain. You can also manage emails, FTP, Apache vhost, statistic and much more.