Cpanel 11 vs Plesk

[nibb@]

Im monitoring Plesk and Cpanel for quite sometime. Maybe 4 years now. In this 4 years Cpanel always had better and more new features then Plesk. We all know that, including that Plesk still forces users to use Dr. Web and other paid software, or pay extra for languages and even Opensource software against Cpanel that is 1 build price with all features. Now Cpanel did it again. Cpanel 11 is far better and with more functions then Plesk. I cannot believe how Plesk always fails behind, i guess they invert more money now on Virtuozzo and other softwares. This is not a Cpanel topic, im a Plesk customers for years, but the recent changes of Sw Soft makes me thing. On plesk i have to pay extra for Tomcat, Spamassin, Languages , Antivirus etc. On Cpanel its all on 1 price. Also Cpanel seems to be better at putting new technologies on their panel, Plesk until now doesnt support tons of Open Source and if they support then like Spamassasin it 0 features at all and its useless. They really attack what PLesk is missing. From Cpanel:
No Surprise Fees
All features are included for a single price.
Technical support through our ticketing system is provided free of
charge with all direct licenses.
Additional community and developer resources are publicly
available.
No forced advertisements are present in our software.

 

[105547111]

One big draw back. They only support FC5, so in 30 days time from now CPANEL don't have a working CP for a supported Fedora OS, as FC5 goes EOL.

 

[atomicturtle]

And dont forget that Cpanel supports the latest and greatest version of apache... 1.3.49!

1999 called. They want their web server back.

Granted, Im completely biased in favor of Plesk, being a founder and all, but seriously, have you tried doing anything high performance on apache 1.3? You cant even use mod_security with it because it uses such a limited implementation of pcre.

 

[breun]

And using Atomic Rocket Turtle's packages you don't need to pay for Dr. Web or SpamAssassin support. Qmail-scanner plus the latest ClamAV and SpamAssassin is working just fine.

 

[nibb@]

Originally posted by breun
And using Atomic Rocket Turtle's packages you don't need to pay for Dr. Web or SpamAssassin support. Qmail-scanner plus the latest ClamAV and SpamAssassin is working just fine.

So we have to make hacks and mods to use things that are already free? Install addons that are not default is more work for every sever, more admin time not to mention what happens when you have to upgrade. Also Plesk doesnt come with the latest and most recent packages. My plesk 8 has Tomcat 4 and it doesnt even work trought port 80 only torugh 9080 so thats a very updated new Plesk server.
Also not to mention Plesk still doesnt have the option on Mysql to allow remote connections to database. Im a Plesk user for years, but customers starts to ask for things they have on other control panels, hey, even ISPConfig has that option jajaja. Im working hours a day just to make plesk have options that come on Free control panels !!!!! What about that for a 1200$ control panel. And i have to pay 75$ for every support ticket !!!!

 

[breun]

When you're paying for Plesk's SpamAssassin support, you're paying for the GUI they made that integrates SpamAssassin into the Plesk web interface.

Plesk uses a lot of packages of the distribution you choose. The versions of Apache, PHP, etcetera are not determined by Plesk, but by the distribution you're running. Plesk works just fine with Tomcat 5 and remote MySQL databases and connections from outside are possible also.

 

[siren@]

Originally posted by nibb
So we have to make hacks and mods to use things that are already free? Install addons that are not default is more work for every sever, more admin time not to mention what happens when you have to upgrade. Also Plesk doesnt come with the latest and most recent packages. My plesk 8 has Tomcat 4 and it doesnt even work trought port 80 only torugh 9080 so thats a very updated new Plesk server.
Also not to mention Plesk still doesnt have the option on Mysql to allow remote connections to database. Im a Plesk user for years, but customers starts to ask for things they have on other control panels, hey, even ISPConfig has that option jajaja. Im working hours a day just to make plesk have options that come on Free control panels !!!!! What about that for a 1200$ control panel. And i have to pay 75$ for every support ticket !!!!

Yeah, as if cPanel isn't hacks and addons? Up until recently Spamassassin and Clamd weren't even supported and in the current version of cPanel (I'm speaking current release, not just "current version") it's still beta.

As for admin time, I spend more time fixing broken stuff on cPanel than I even look at our Plesk servers.

As for the remote mysql, look at PowerToys. Just like cPanel has to have Fantastico to compete with the Plesk Application Vault.

As for the cost, Plesk Plus is around $1100 USD and cPanel is $1495 for an owned license.

Which one is more expensive?

 

[siren@]

Originally posted by breun
When you're paying for Plesk's SpamAssassin support, you're paying for the GUI they made that integrates SpamAssassin into the Plesk web interface.

Plesk uses a lot of packages of the distribution you choose. The versions of Apache, PHP, etcetera are not determined by Plesk, but by the distribution you're running. Plesk works just fine with Tomcat 5 and remote MySQL databases and connections from outside are possible also.

A better way to say this Breun is that Plesk uses standard packages and software available to the OS you are installing on.

By doing so this allows you to upgrade to the latest and greatest with limited potential of damaging anything, unlike cPanel.

 

[smerkel]

From a hoster perspective, try supporting 800 servers with cPanel on it. Each one could have a different minor version of the CP. It’s better then it used to be, but it still does not appear nearly as controlled as PSA. (Like it or not – daily feature enhancements may not always be a good thing)

As for hacks:

/scripts/adduser:

#!/bin/bash

exec '/scripts/realadduser', @ARGV;

Seriously... why would anyone do this?

Cheers,

Steve

 

[mediashaker]

both hare good and bad

Originally posted by atomicturtle
And dont forget that Cpanel supports the latest and greatest version of apache... 1.3.49!

1999 called. They want their web server back.

haha how about;

And dont forget that Plesk supports the latest and greatest version of qmail!

1999 called. They want their mail server back.

Both have their strengths and weaknesses.. I would say that plesks strengths are the with their web interface and migration tools. Cpanels strengths are the huge cpanel community forums and you get more out of the box (they don't charge for addons etc) Also with cpanel there are more open source tools that word well with it (eg. ConfigServer Security & Firewall CSF).

If you have the cash you can build some pretty good boxes on plesk with all the 4psa addons installed.

 

[atomicturtle]

Haha, you know Ive said that (about qmail) in the forums before. You're a little off too, qmail was old in 1998

Its apples and oranges, leaving out that postfix will be available soon, SMTP hasn't really changed much in the last 20 years. I could run mail through a version of sendmail from 1989 and you'd never know the difference. If I tried to do that with the original 1994 CERN webserver I can't think of anything that would work

Point being, the cpanel design itself is monolithic. They implemented everything themselves, and leveraged nothing from the community. So to make a change to anything, even something small, means they've got to do all the footwork on their own. That increases your development costs in both time and money. Thats why you dont see cpanel on windows, or osx, even though they had that on the list for more than 5 years now. They just cant afford it.

 

[mediashaker]

swsoft 600 developers

I still remember back in the day when Plesk never used the os's packages. Yes it was a mess. Good luck upgrading .. you were basically at the mercy or the plesk devel team.

Changing to use the OS packages was a great leap forward (If even they might use the community resources a little too much and get into trouble by not respecting certain licenses: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/01/0142248

The big thing is that they have received a lot of venture funding now (Over 12 million.. so you would think that development would be flying .. Sergey Beloussov has stated that they have over 600 developers / engineers working out of russia.. If that is the case .. you could burn through 12 million pretty quickly...

I'm always surprised by this .. 600 developers and you can't even implement awstats properly? (It only stores one month of stats)..

Atomic when were you at swsoft ( you said that you were a founder )? What was life like in the beginning?.. and what made you leave? Your own forums seem to be more community orientated. I would love to see all your security related packages enabled by default in plesk ASL 2.0 will be sweet!.. that would be huge for plesk .. (the default security is a bit lacking)

You can watch the video of Sergy here:
http://www.sys-con.tv/read/209281.htm

 

[atomicturtle]

I was a junior founder of Plesk, we sold the company to sw-soft in 2003. So I never worked for sw-soft directly myself. I can say I am very happy with how things have turned out. Things at plesk were lean We were very much the underdog to folks like Cpanel, Ensim, etc. If I remember correctly, our staff at plesk was about 80 total at the peak, the bulk of the developers working on PEM.

I feel your pain about security, its really tough to do something well, and have it be usable for everyone. Look at SELinux, theres nothing as advanced out there on any OS when it comes to security capabilities. Its also so incredibly granular and esoteric that its out of reach for the vast majority of admins. Thats a shortcoming of nearly every security product, they all require customization for the environment.

Its a 50/50 equation, 50% of the problem is the vendor staying on top of bugs. The other 50% is the implementor. You can fix the problem as the vendor, but the user down stream has to implement it.

 

[Amin Taheri]

Originally posted by atomicturtle
And dont forget that Cpanel supports the latest and greatest version of apache... 1.3.49!

1999 called. They want their web server back.

Granted, Im completely biased in favor of Plesk, being a founder and all, but seriously, have you tried doing anything high performance on apache 1.3? You cant even use mod_security with it because it uses such a limited implementation of pcre.

I installed plesk on a RHEL4 and it gave me apache 1.3

When I used Fedora on my test box it used apache 2.x

 

[breun]

Yeah well, Plesk installs whatever version of apache comes with the distribution you installed. If you want apache 2, choose a distribution that comes with apache 2.

 

[Amin Taheri]

my fault your right, I meant 2.2 vs 2.0 :s

 

[Daniel15]

In my short experience with Plesk, I've found it to be much better than cPanel. I help admin a web host that uses cPanel, but use Plesk on my personal server. One thing I've noticed with Plesk is that it has a very small amount of server settings. On the other hand, cPanel has way too many things (anyone ever seen root WHM? So many links in the menu!). This is both good and bad - Plesk seems a little too simplistic.

There are several things I hate about cPanel - The fact that it has heaps of stuff in WHM that nobody would ever use, it makes some simple things really hard, it essentially "takes control" of the system (forcing you to use its packages for heaps of things), and it also has heaps of stupid typos. Plesk is better in almost all regards (well, except for typos - Plesk also has its share of typos, and I've noticed quite a lot of Engrish as well!).

And dont forget that Cpanel supports the latest and greatest version of apache... 1.3.49!

Actually, it uses Apache 1.3.37 (leet!). Their latest EasyApache version will support Apache 2.0 and 2.2, but the "CURRENT" build has been delayed for a while (it was scheduled for the start of May, pushed back to the end of May, then the start of June, then the end of June, and now it's scheduled for mid-July. I now use the term "pulled a cPanel" to mean delayed without telling the general public why).