Difference between cPanel and DirectAdmin
Wondering what’s the best web panel for your use?
You are at the right place
A web hosting control panel is a web-based interface provided by a web hosting service that allows users to manage their servers and hosted services. You need to know the best choice between cPanel and DirectAdmin. Both of these are control panels used for hosting and provide the administrative options for managing all the parts of your hosting account. When there’s a comparison, one of them is certainly better than the other, but before we get there, you need to know what these web control panels have got to offer.
What is DirectAdmin?
As a paid control panel, which requires a license, DirectAdmin is one of the best choices you will find. You need a paid control panel (most hosting companies provide one) because free control panels simply don’t give you the security and features necessary for most projects.
This is one of the easiest control panels to use and provides access to webmail, admin options, your file manager and so much more. When you log in, you will notice, everything is laid out for you on one screen. This makes it easy to find what you’re looking for within the administrative area. To use DirectAdmin users should have little technical knowledge.
What is cPanel?
cPanel is the best web control panel you’ll find in the market. It’s another paid control panel and most of the best hosting companies provide cPanel with your account. The features and ease of use make this one of the best choices on the internet for beginners and advanced users.
Beginners will find cPanel very easy to navigate and unlike DirectAdmin, cPanel splits the features into categories, which makes them easier to find. cPanel also provides more features and plugins than DirectAdmin does. User’s don’t need to be from a technical background to use cPanel.
Differences between cPanel and DirectAdmin:
GUI (The Graphical User Interface):
Both panels offer a clean, organized, modern GUI. A picture is worth a thousand words, so let’s allow you to make your own decision about the skins.
cPanel dashboard layout and File Manager:
DirectAdmin dashboard layout and file manager:
Both of these layouts are quite modern and facilitate server and domain management via a friendly, easy-to-use interface.
Major differences between DirectAdmin and cPanel:
DirectAdmin and cPanel are very similar being web panels, yet they are very different from one another. Both of these web panels provide a server configuration framework and UI, but DirectAdmin leaves quite a bit of the work to be done in the root shell and it can be said that it’s more developer-friendly.
Whereas, cPanel provides nearly all the configuration and functionality within the UI. This makes it far easier to use and a better fit for just about all user levels.
Supported Webservers:
DirectAdmin has a wide variety of Web server support.
| DirectAdmin | cPanel |
|---|---|
| Apache | Apache |
| Nginx | Apache + Nginx Reverse Proxy |
| Apache + Nginx Reverse Proxy | |
| LiteSpeed (requires paid license) | LiteSpeed (requires paid license) |
| OpenLitespeed |
Email:
Both DirectAdmin and cPanel support the following email features with them:
-
Catch-all email accounts in the server
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Autoresponders/Vacation Messages
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Mail Queue Administration Interface
-
Mass Email address/forwarders import features
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Quota Enforcement
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Strong Password Enforcement
-
Ability to Mass Email All Users
-
Automatic purging of mailboxes
-
One-click Webmail login when authenticated via the web panel
DirectAdmin and cPanel both use some of the same Webmail software, so the email capabilities of one panel should match those of the other.
Which one to choose at BaseZap?
At BaseZap our cPanel based Hosting comes with proactive support whereas DirectAdmin-based hosting comes with limited support for server-related issues. If you are a non-technical user then it is highly recommended to opt for cPanel based Hosting and if you are good with technical things and can manage website-related tasks then it’s good to go with DirectAdmin-based Hosting.
Order your Premium cPanel based Hosting today: Click here
Order your Starter DirectAdmin based Hosting today: Click here
Find more guides on DirectAdmin here
Find more guides on cPanel here
