Who each is for
CloudPanel is for people who want a capable, free, PHP-and-Node-centred panel on a single VPS and are comfortable with MySQL or MariaDB, phpMyAdmin and Varnish. Its licence is free of charge but not open source, and it forbids reselling or hosting for third parties for a fee without permission.
auraPanel is for people running a mixed estate on a server they own — WordPress next to Laravel, a Node.js service, a Python app, a container stack — who want PostgreSQL as a first-class engine, a real database console instead of phpMyAdmin, per-site backups with restore into a new site, and signed updates with rollback, and who accept a per-server licence for that.
Where auraPanel is stronger
- PostgreSQL alongside MariaDB, chosen per database.
- auraDB: schema browsing, SQL with EXPLAIN, grid editing and privilege management with role checks and a hash-chained audit trail, instead of phpMyAdmin.
- Docker Compose as a site type, with the compose file validated before it starts.
- Backups that capture database and files together, restore into a new site with credential re-home, and provider snapshots on seven clouds.
- Signed updates with automatic rollback, passkeys, per-resource roles, an audit log of every action.
- A commercial licence you can rely on for client hosting, and support from the maker.
Where CloudPanel is stronger
- Price: it is free of charge for your own use.
- A firewall interface: UFW rules are managed from the admin area. auraPanel configures UFW at install and then leaves rules to you.
- Varnish Cache per site, with a WordPress plugin; auraPanel's page cache is nginx FastCGI/proxy cache and Redis.
- Remote database access by allow-listing an IP; auraPanel keeps databases on loopback only.
- PHP 7.1 onwards and MySQL as well as MariaDB, for older applications.
Moving from CloudPanel
Both panels lay sites out as a Linux user with a document root, so a site moves as files plus a database dump: export with clpctl db:export, create the site in auraPanel, upload the files over SFTP, and import with apcli db import. For WordPress, restoring a backup into a new auraPanel site re-homes the database credentials for you. There is no one-click importer. MySQL-specific features that MariaDB lacks need checking first.
Frequently asked
Is CloudPanel open source?
Its licence terms describe free-of-charge proprietary software with GPL components inside; they prohibit reverse engineering and reselling or third-party hosting for a fee without permission. Read the licence terms linked under the table before building a business on either product.
Which is faster?
We have not benchmarked the two and will not guess. Both front sites with nginx; CloudPanel adds the PageSpeed module and optional Varnish; auraPanel offers nginx page caching and Redis.
How do their nginx configurations differ?
Directive by directive, in What a control panel writes into nginx for WordPress: auraPanel's rendered server block from a live host next to CloudPanel's published WordPress template.