A brand-new control panel joined the market this summer. CorePanel, built for RHEL-family servers around a web server of its own, launched a free edition on July 14 and now lists flat per-server prices for its paid tiers. The interesting part is who is behind it. Pyxsoft has spent years selling anti-malware and firewall tooling for cPanel servers, which puts CorePanel on a short list with Softaculous’s Webuzo: cPanel alternatives built by vendors whose businesses grew inside cPanel’s own ecosystem.

The software is weeks old, its first 1.0 builds appearing only in mid-August, and no independent review of it exists yet, so it is a signal rather than a verdict. The signal, though, fits a pattern years in the making. For most of the industry’s history the control panel was a settled default. It is now a decision, and what the incumbents charge is a large part of why the choice gets weighed at all.

The short version

  • The driver. cPanel and Plesk sit under the same owner, and cPanel’s account-tiered pricing has risen most years since the 2019 overhaul, reaching $29.99 to $69.99 per month by tier in 2026, plus per-account charges above 100.
  • The in-house route. A set of hosts run their own panel, among them SiteGround, Hostinger, DreamHost, 20i and ScalaHosting.
  • The independent route. A field of third-party panels competes largely on not charging per account, from paid options like DirectAdmin to free ones like CyberPanel, and it is still gaining entrants: CorePanel arrived this summer.
  • The honest caveat. This is a directional shift, not a measured stampede, and the flagship example, SiteGround, cites control rather than cost.

One Owner, Two Panels, and a Climbing Bill

The pricing story starts with who owns what. cPanel, Plesk and the SolusVM virtualization panel all sit inside WebPros, a group that has passed between private-equity hands. Oakley Capital bought into cPanel in 2018, and CVC Capital Partners has held the majority since 2020, with Oakley staying on as a minority backer. In other words, the two panels most hosts would name as direct competitors answer to the same parent.

The shift that reset expectations came in 2019, when cPanel replaced its old model of a flat per-server license with unlimited accounts with tiers priced by account count. The change was announced without much warning, and the reaction was loud: one provider said its bill would rise by 800 percent for its particular configuration. cPanel has raised prices most years since. By 2026 the published tiers run from Solo at $29.99 a month for a single account to Premier at $69.99 for up to 100 accounts, with Admin and Pro in between. Accounts above 100 are billed at 49 cents each. For a host with thousands of accounts, that is a real and rising number. Plesk, under the same roof, has moved the same way, with another increase and a shift toward monthly billing arriving for 2026.

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The Hosts That Run Their Own Panel

The most complete answer to control-panel cost is to stop paying for one. Several established hosts have built their own. SiteGround replaced cPanel with its in-house Site Tools, finishing the migration of every account by April 2021. Hostinger ships its custom hPanel, DreamHost runs its own panel and does not offer cPanel at all, and the reseller-focused 20i built StackCP, which it markets on carrying no license fees. ScalaHosting is a useful example of the pattern. Its SPanel, in service since 2018, is both the panel on its own managed plans and a product it licenses to other operators, in flat tiers sized by account count with no per-account charge on top. The company still sells cPanel plans alongside it.

It would be tidy to say these hosts built their own panels because of the price, but the record is more honest than that. SiteGround’s chief executive said publicly that the company began building Site Tools around 2016, before the pricing overhaul, and that cPanel’s increase had nothing to do with the move. The motives SiteGround gives are control and product direction: owning the interface, shaping it around websites rather than accounts, and not having to work inside a third party’s framework. Cost is the backdrop that makes the build worth it, not always the trigger.

The Independent Panels Competing on Price

For hosts that want an off-the-shelf panel without cPanel’s per-account model, the alternative field is broader than it was five years ago. They split roughly into paid licenses and free or open options:

  • DirectAdmin is the long-standing commercial rival, sold as flat per-license tiers whose top tier carries unlimited accounts and domains for a fixed monthly price.
  • CyberPanel, built on the OpenLiteSpeed web server, is free and open in its base edition. CloudPanel and the core of aaPanel are likewise free.
  • Webuzo, from Softaculous, licenses flat per server with account limits by tier.
  • AdminBolt prices flat per server with unlimited accounts and no per-account charge.
  • CorePanel, the newest arrival on this list, targets RHEL-family servers with its own web server, a free 20-website edition, and flat per-server paid tiers. It is early software, weeks past its July launch, with no independent reviews yet.

The common thread across the field is the pitch itself: one price per server with no per-account metering. A bill that grows with every account added has been the running complaint about the incumbent model since 2019.

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Why Most Hosts Stay Put

None of this has dislodged cPanel, and it is worth being clear about why. Its real advantage is not any single feature but its ecosystem, above all the deep integration with WHMCS billing that automates provisioning, suspension and termination for a hosting business. WHMCS, as it happens, is also a WebPros brand, so the tool that anchors hosts to cPanel answers to the same parent. Moving away means retraining staff on a new interface, giving up cPanel-specific tools and integrations, and rewriting documentation and customer guidance. Those switching costs are hard to quantify but easy to feel, and they keep many providers in place despite the rising fees. Even the largest brands hedge: GoDaddy still ships cPanel on its standard Linux hosting while reserving a custom dashboard for managed WordPress.

The scale is easy to overstate. cPanel is still thought to reach tens of millions of website owners, and no independent count captures how many hosts have actually moved off it. What has changed is the direction of travel. The incumbent’s price rises most years, the field of credible alternatives keeps widening, and the control panel is no longer a default a host picks without thinking. It is a decision with a number attached.

About the Data

cPanel tier pricing comes from its own pricing page, Plesk’s parallel increases from hosting-industry reporting, and the ownership history from Oakley Capital’s disclosures. The 2019 change comes from The Register, and the estimate of cPanel’s reach from later trade coverage. The in-house-panel examples and SiteGround’s rationale come from each host’s announcements, and the alternative panels’ pricing and vendor histories from their sites. CorePanel’s launch date and pricing come from its site, which labels the prices indicative, and its capabilities are unreviewed vendor claims. No independent measure of control-panel share exists, so the shift away from cPanel is a direction, not a quantified count.