When choosing between web hosting control panels, Plesk and cPanel are the primary contenders. Between them, they dominate the market for users looking for account and server management tools.

Released in 1996, cPanel is the original contender, and as such has a high number of legacy users. The current release is cPanel 82. Modern versions of cPanel are actually a combination of cPanel and WHM (Web Host Manager) interfaces, where the former is for customer account management, and the latter is for server administration. But, for the rest of this blog we’ll just call the package ‘cPanel’.

Plesk has been around since 2001, with the current stable release being Plesk Onyx. We previously wrote a review of Plesk Onyx. Its newest version, Plesk Obsidian, boasts a number of UI and functionality upgrades.