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auraPanel vs cPanel vs Plesk: the parts that decide it.

Three web hosting control panels, side by side on licensing, limits, WordPress, databases and price. Competitor facts are quoted from their own pricing pages as read on 17 September 2026, with links; their prices change, so check the source before you buy.

∞sites per auraPanel licence — no account or domain tiers
2 enginesPostgreSQL and MariaDB, with a built-in console
0 add-onsWordPress tooling, cache and backups are the panel
30 daysfree, no credit card required
auraPanelcPanelPlesk
Licence unitPer server. One licence covers the server and everything on it.Per server per month, tiered by number of accounts.Per server, tiered by number of domains.
Sites per licenceUnlimited sites and applications.Solo 1 account · Admin up to 5 · Pro up to 30 · Premier up to 100 (more at extra cost).Web Admin up to 10 domains · Web Pro up to 30 · Web Host unlimited.
Price of the entry plan$24.95 / server / monthSolo from $27.46 / month on annual billing, per their pricing page.Web Admin from €12.04 / month, per their pricing page.
WordPress toolingIncluded for every site: one-click install, WordPress-aware cache, PHP per site, restore points.WP Toolkit listed as included; WP Squared is a separate licence.WP Toolkit SE on Web Admin; full WP Toolkit on Web Pro and Web Host.
Database consoleauraDB included: PostgreSQL and MariaDB in the browser, with EXPLAIN and grid editing.phpMyAdmin (MySQL/MariaDB).phpMyAdmin (MySQL/MariaDB), phpPgAdmin for PostgreSQL.
Database enginesPostgreSQL and MariaDB, chosen per database.MySQL / MariaDB.MySQL / MariaDB; PostgreSQL supported.
Operating systemsDebian 12 and 13, Ubuntu 22.04, 24.04 and 26.04 LTS, on x86-64 and ARM64.Linux only; see cPanel’s system requirements for the current list.Linux and Windows Server; see Plesk’s system requirements for the current list.
Application catalogueOne-click and assisted installers in the panel — WordPress, Drupal, Laravel, Moodle, Nextcloud, Gitea, Docker Compose and more.Via installers and extensions; varies by host.Extensions catalogue, some paid.
UpdatesEd25519-signed self-update from the panel; automatic updates optional.Vendor-managed update tiers.Vendor-managed update tiers.
Usage telemetryNo usage analytics. The panel contacts the licensing service once a day (machine fingerprint, licence state) and GitHub for release checks; nothing about your sites or visitors leaves the server.See cPanel’s privacy documentation.See Plesk’s privacy documentation.
Free trial30 days, no credit card required.Trial licences offered; see their site.Trial licences offered; see their site.

Sources: cPanel pricing and Plesk pricing, read 17 September 2026. cPanel, WHM and Plesk are trademarks of their respective owners; auraPanel is not affiliated with either.

Where auraPanel is the better fit

You own or rent the server and want one flat licence for it, with no thought given to how many sites go on it. You run more than WordPress — Laravel, Node, Python, Docker Compose — and want PostgreSQL as a first-class engine with a real console. You care that the panel sends nothing home and that updates are signed.

Where cPanel or Plesk may be the better fit

You resell hosting and need reseller accounts and a billing integration such as WHMCS. You need Windows Server (Plesk). You depend on a specific extension from their marketplaces, or on a hosting provider’s support that is built around one of them. auraPanel has no reseller layer and no third-party extension marketplace.

Moving from cPanel or Plesk

There is no one-click importer today. A site moves as files plus a database dump, restored into a new auraPanel site; for WordPress the restore re-homes the database credentials automatically. Tell us what you are moving and we will say honestly how much of it the panel covers.

See auraPanel pricing →  ·  vs CloudPanel →  ·  vs RunCloud →

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Recent updates

What shipped in the last releases. With automatic updates on, each lands on your server the moment it is published.

  1. v1.21.3
    Framework sites were undetectable, and a restore could silently point the copy at the original's live database.

    DetectApp looked for each application's signature relative to the docroot — but every PHP framework in the registry serves from a subdirectory (DocrootSub: public, webroot, web, pub, docroot) and keeps the file that identifies it one level *above* that. So the Laravel signature searched <project>/public/artisan,…

  2. v1.21.2
    Restarting nginx now blocks the panel and reconnects, instead of showing a notice.

    v1.21.1 stopped the false "HTTP 520" but only put up a toast — and a toast is the wrong affordance when the panel itself is about to go away: the page sat there looking broken while every request failed underneath it.

  3. v1.21.1
    Restarting nginx from Services no longer reports a false failure.

    It showed "Restart failed — HTTP 520". The panel is reverse-proxied *by* nginx, so the request deadlocked against itself: the handler blocked waiting for the restart to finish, while nginx's graceful stop waited for that very request to drain. Neither could proceed until nginx's stop-retry timeout force-killed it,…

  4. v1.21.0
    Per-site X-Frame-Options, fixing page builders that couldn't load their preview.

    Elementor's editor failed with *"Multiple 'X-Frame-Options' headers with conflicting values ('DENY, SAMEORIGIN')"*. The cause is that nginx's add_header appends rather than replaces: when the application also sets the header — a WordPress security plugin, or a CDN transform — the browser received two values,…

  5. v1.20.6
    The multi-database restore refusal now says what is in the backup and what still works.

    It read only "Restoring a multi-database site isn't supported yet", which is a dead end: it named neither the databases involved, nor why one of them is the limit, nor any route forward.

  6. v1.20.5
    Services: cards in a row now match heights.

    Like the settings grid before it, the Services grid pinned each card to its own content height, so a row often showed one card noticeably shorter than the card beside it. Each row now takes the taller card's height and both fill it, and it re-balances as content changes — a runtime installed, a longer service list.

  7. v1.20.4
    Settings: paired cards now match heights.

    Organisation / Panel Domain and auraPanel Updates / Session timeout each sat at their own content height, so a row showed one card visibly shorter than its neighbour. Each row now takes the taller card's height and both fill it — driven by content, not a fixed value, so it still adapts as a card grows (a validation…

  8. v1.20.3
    Settings: Organisation and Panel Domain now share a row too.

    They were full-width blocks stacked above the rest of the page; they now sit side by side in the same two-column grid as the Updates / Session timeout pair, so the top of Settings reads as two tidy rows instead of four stacked bands. Both cards shrink cleanly — the logo drop zone is a fixed 44×44 and the name field…

All releases on GitHub ↗