Enhance Control Panel vs. cPanel
As someone who has spent years working with cPanel and Plesk, I’ve explored many control panels, including Interworx, DirectAdmin, Webmin, ISPConfig, and others. But when I discovered Enhance Control Panel, I realized that it offers potential far beyond what I had experienced with the others, especially when compared to cPanel.
Why Enhance Stands Out
If your business relies on a multi-server virtualized environment, you can’t go wrong with Enhance. As I always say, managing cloud clusters with DirectAdmin or cPanel feels like pulling teeth, while with Enhance, it’s a breeze.
Regarding Ubuntu vs. other RHEL distros—wait until you hit the end of life for those distros. You’ll be forced to destroy your entire DirectAdmin server fleet one by one, rebuild new servers with new IPs, and migrate all your clients. We’ve been there several times, and it’s a total pain in the neck for weeks.
Meanwhile, Enhance users can simply upgrade 20–30 servers to the latest LTS version while enjoying a cup of espresso—all in about half an hour.
Need to add a single new server? With DirectAdmin or cPanel, it takes hours and is a boring manual process. With Enhance, you can add 10 new replica servers in half an hour, fully optimized with your favorite web server, PHP settings, and everything else. Not to mention the backup restore functionality with the 2025 Btrfs style vs. the 1990s style of other backup systems, or the way we seamlessly transfer websites across servers with one click, while DirectAdmin/cPanel users spend hours doing the same.
For us, these features alone sealed the deal and made our decision a no-brainer.
One of the key features that sets Enhance apart is its ability to utilize OpenLiteSpeed as a web server. While other control panels like DirectAdmin and CyberPanel also support OpenLiteSpeed, Enhance provides a professional, stable, and user-friendly solution that outshines them all. DirectAdmin’s integration with OpenLiteSpeed can be complicated and time-consuming, and CyberPanel, though free, is plagued by slow updates and a lack of community support. Enhance, on the other hand, offers a streamlined and reliable experience for anyone looking to leverage OpenLiteSpeed.
Even if OpenLiteSpeed isn’t your web server of choice and you prefer NGINX, Enhance still outperforms both cPanel and Plesk in several critical areas:
- Dedicated Server Roles: Enhance allows you to easily assign specific roles to different servers, such as database, mail, DNS, caching, backups, or even just the control panel itself. This flexibility not only improves performance but also simplifies server management.
- Cost Efficiency: Enhance is often more affordable than both cPanel and Plesk, which can be prohibitively expensive for many users.
- Future-Ready: Unlike cPanel and Plesk, which have publicly stated they won’t support High Availability (HA) or Load Balancing (LB) in the future, Enhance’s roadmap hints at the potential for these features. This forward-thinking approach could be a game-changer for those looking to scale their infrastructure efficiently.
Ease of Use and Migration
Another major advantage of Enhance is how easy it is to install and get started with, especially on Ubuntu. Compared to cPanel, which requires hours of installation, configuration, and hardening, Enhance’s setup is straightforward and quick. Additionally, the ease of migrating roles within your server estate makes Enhance an even more attractive option for those managing multiple servers.
Backups That Work
Backups are crucial, and Enhance excels in this area as well. The speed and efficiency of backups with Enhance are significantly better than what I’ve experienced with cPanel, making it an essential tool for maintaining server reliability.
Conclusion
cPanel and Plesk have been industry standards for years, but they lack the innovation and flexibility that Enhance brings to the table. While cPanel and Plesk remain stable and well-tested, they are no longer leading the way in control panel development. Enhance is designed to grow and adapt to the needs of modern server management, making it a more future-proof choice.
At cPFence, we understand the importance of security and efficient server management, which is why we recommend Enhance Control Panel for users looking to get the most out of their servers. The seamless integration with CPFence software ensures that your servers are not only managed efficiently but are also protected with top-tier security.
Ready to make the switch? Discover the benefits of Enhance Control Panel today.
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