When it comes to running a successful business or website online, one of the first things you’ll need is an effective hosting platform. Plesk and cPanel are some of the most popular options in the marketplace today when you’re searching for server and account management, but for many webmasters, it can be difficult to decide between the two.

As the oldest hosting solution, released in 1996, cPanel has a high number of loyal users that have remained by its side over the years. The most modern versions of cPanel today combine cPanel technology with web host manager interfaces, to ensure that customers have server administration options and customer account management solutions.

On the other hand, Plesk is the newest contender on the market, having entered the fray in 2001. Though newer, Plesk still has plenty of advantages to offer its users when it comes to achieving a stable and efficient hosting solution.

Performance for cPanel vs Plesk

When it comes to choosing a web hosting platform, performance is usually the first thing that most companies worry about. In general, cPanel can load faster than Plesk, because it’s a control panel that’s focused almost entirely on optimising performance. Because the amount of memory required to run cPanel is minimal, developers can speed up load times and enjoy faster account creation.

Security for cPanel vs Plesk

When it comes to privacy and security, both cPanel and Plesk are designed to give you as much peace of mind as possible. While the features for each are very different, both cPanel and Plesk come with a range of security tools to use.
For instance, some of the cPanel tools for security include password-protected directories, automatic SSL installation, and IP address denial. On the other hand, Plesk comes with outbound and inbound email anti-spam, fail2ban intrusion protection, and active directory implementation.

Cost: cPanel vs Plesk

Both cPanel and Plesk are licensed control panels for web hosting solutions, and they’re available on cloud and dedicated servers for modern webmasters. The price of the solution will depend on how you choose to access your control panel. For instance, on Cloud servers, the price for cPanel and Plesk usually start at around £10 per month.

User Interfaces for cPanel vs Plesk

Of the available hosting control panels, Plesk is currently considered to have a far cleaner and easier-to-use GUI, or graphical user interface. It’s also simpler to use for many newbies to web management. Plesk is incredibly streamlined and offers feature sets that have been carefully grouped into a list that run down the left-hand side of the program. When you click the features, they expand to show you what’s available.

Alternatively, the cPanel interface doesn’t group the tools and features with as much support as you might want from a new user interface. For many, the cPanel solution may be too cluttered to be simple, although it does allow for some customisation if you’re having trouble finding things on the home screen.

Tools and Features: cPanel vs Plesk

When unpackaged straight out of the box, cPanel and Plesk both offer users the primary features you might expect for account and server management. Both can be used to configure settings, manage email accounts, and run file transfer protocol. Though it is possible to apply additional apps within cPanel, Plesk comes packaged with support for extensions and useful apps straight out of the box.

Plesk comes with support for Linux “Docker”, which includes a collection of more than 200,000 images to be launched directly from the Plesk control panel. The system is also compatible with Git. Although you can get both Git and Docker running with cPanel through workarounds, it is far more complicated.

Operating Systems: cPanel vs Plesk

Perhaps the most significant difference to note between the cPanel and Plesk hosting systems is that cPanel is only available on Linux, while Plesk is available on Windows too. cPanel is supported by Cloud Linux, CentOS, and also the RedHat Enterprise operating systems for Linux, while Plesk is available on 14 different Linux solutions, along with Windows servers.

Generally, the hosting control panel you choose is likely to depend on the operating system you want to run on your server.

Which Operating System Wins?

Ultimately, your choice whether to run the Plesk or cPanel strategy for web hosting will depend on which control panel is available to your hosting system. However, if you have the choice of either solution, you will probably find that your decision is made by the server that’s easiest to use. For many people, this will be Plesk, unless you already have experience using the legacy systems available in cPanel.