cPanel has always been the most popular control panel, however after year on year massive price increases its time to look at alternative options. We have made a comparison for cPanel vs DirectAdmin
Migrating between cPanel & DirectAdmin is simple and all content is migrated including website files, databases, email accounts and content and all passwords.
This article is valid as of 27th October 2020 and below is a list of applications/services that are supported on DirectAdmin and cPanel.
| Feature | cPanel | DirectAdmin |
| Can Create Resellers | ✅ | ✅ |
| Support for Apache | ✅ | ✅ |
| Support for LiteSpeed | ✅ | ✅ |
| MariaDB Version | 10.3 | 10.5 |
| Support for CentOS 8 | ❌ | ✅ |
| Support for CloudLinux 8 | ❌ | ✅ |
| Support for multiple PHP Versions | ✅ | ✅ |
| Can Create Reseller Name Servers | ✅ | ✅ |
| Support for Lets Encrypt with Auto-Renewal | ✅ | ✅ |
| Works with WHMCS | ✅ | ✅ |
| Supports ConfigServer Firewall | ✅ | ✅ |
| Support for Softaculous Installer | ✅ | ✅ |
| JetBackups | ✅ | ✅ |
| Acronis Cyber Cloud Backup | ✅ | ❌ |
| Support for MailChannels | ✅ | ✅ |
| PHPMyAdmin & WebMail access | ✅ | ✅ |
| Imunify360 | ✅ | ✅ |
| Automated SSL installation with WHMCS | ✅ | ✅ |
| Works with new WHMCS Metrics Billing | ✅ | ✅ |
| Unified Control Panel | ❌ | ✅ |
| Minimal Impact on Server Resources | ❌ | ✅ |
| Nginx Support | ❌ | ✅ |
The biggest difference between the 2 control panels is the monthly cost!
cPanel charges an expensive license fee + charges per user.
Here is a breakdown for approximate costs for cPanel vs DirectAdmin based on number of accounts on a single cloud server.
| Number of hosting accounts | cPanel | DirectAdmin |
| 100 | $50/£45 per month | $8/£5 per month |
| 200 | $70/£65 per month | $8/£5 per month |
| 300 | $90/£80 per month | $8/£5 per month |
| 400 | $110/£80 per month | $8/£5 per month |
| 500 | $130/£110 per month | $8/£5 per month |
