cPanel and Plesk are the most widely used web hosting control panels in the market. cPanel was earlier launched in the year 1996 and has become the preferred choice for most of the hosting services all around the globe. It can be installed over the Unix-based operating systems like Linux distributions CentOS or Red Hat. Plesk came up in the year 2000 with a different system that supports the Linux servers and the Windows.
One of the most significant advantages of cPanel is that it has got a high number of users worldwide and is very easy to get solutions to any problems that may arise, get advice and tips from the other cPanel users. As the cPanel comes with a very short learning curve, anyone who hadn’t ever used a web hosting can also find it easy to use the cPanel. When you look at the performance of cPanel and Plesk, cPanel will load at a faster rate. It’s a web hosting control panel which mainly focuses on performance optimization.
The cPanel developers had aimed on speeding up the page load time by reducing the memory required. This also helped in creating accounts at a faster rate while managing other server related tasks efficiently. A website can perform much better if it’s loading time increases to a great extent. Nowadays a website gets many visitors through the mobile handsets and if the site loads at a faster speed, more visitors are expected to visit the site and stay for a longer time and hence the readability of the content increases to a great extent by many times.
When the features and tools are considered, both Plesk and cPanel provide the users with the same kind of primary features for the server and to manage the account. Both the control panels can be used for configuring the DNS settings, to manage the email accounts, run the file transfer protocol and to manage the databases. Plesk comes with better support system with a greater number of useful apps while you can add extra apps even to the cPanel.
cPanel and Plesk both focus mainly on security issues. Each of these comes with several security tools though they have different features. Security features of cPanel are much better as it offers password protection. The cPanel security tools come with password- protected directories, automatic SSL certificate installation along with the IP address denials. Plesk comes with the inbound and outbound email antispam, fail2ban intrusion prevention and active directory integration. Plesk is available for Linux distribution and the Windows server while cPanel is available only for Linux operating systems.
CentOS, CloudLinux, RedHat enterprise are the Linux distributors that support the cPanel. Based on the operating system which one has they can choose the web hosting control panel accordingly. Whenever you are planning to choose a particular web hosting control panel always check the operating system that you have, but one should also go for the one which is much easier to use. Though the features in each of the panel are almost the same, one may prefer the panel according to their experience and feel while they were using it. An important area where the cPanel shines better when compared to Plesk is the extended capabilities with which it can create need based add-ons. cPanel is more economical to buy whether you go of a monthly package or a yearly plan when compared to Plesk.
Though both are used worldwide, cPanel has a number of advantages and is still preferred by many users and web developers across the world.