Comparison
NovaPanel vs cPanel
cPanel still works. It's been the default since 1996 and it'll be around for another decade. But the reasons people stayed — "everyone knows it", "the integrations exist" — get weaker every year as the licence cost climbs and the UI ages.
Here's where NovaPanel beats it, where it ties, and where cPanel is still the right answer.
Competitor prices checked 29 August 2026 from their published rate cards. Both raised prices in January 2026; if these look out of date, theirs will be current and ours will not.
| NovaPanel | cPanel | Edge | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Per-server license cost | Free Community / £4.99/mo Pro | $18-49.50/mo per server | NovaPanel |
| Pricing model | Flat per-server subscription | Tiered by user count + reseller licence | NovaPanel |
| Self-hosted (full control) | Yes | Yes | Tie |
| Reseller / multi-customer support | Yes (built in) | Yes (extra licence tier) | Tie |
| Dual UI (admin + customer) | Yes — separate ports + theming | WHM + cPanel | Tie |
| Auto-TLS | Caddy — every domain, instantly | AutoSSL (manual config) | NovaPanel |
| Modern stack | Go binary, Caddy, Postgres | Perl + Apache (Cloud Linux fork) | NovaPanel |
| Default reverse proxy | Caddy 2 | Apache + nginx wrapper | NovaPanel |
| PostgreSQL support | First-class | Limited / addon | NovaPanel |
| DNSSEC | PowerDNS (toggle in admin) | Manual / paid | NovaPanel |
| WAF | Built-in (Pro) | ModSecurity (config-heavy) | NovaPanel |
| S3 / Backblaze backups | Built-in (Pro) | Manual config | NovaPanel |
| Mature ecosystem | New — fewer 3rd-party plugins | 20+ years of tooling, integrations | cPanel (still) |
| Migration tools (cPanel → us) | Built in (Pro) — upload a backup, dry run, import | (N/A — origin) | NovaPanel |
| Branded white-label | Yes (Pro) | Yes (extra cost) | Tie |
Where NovaPanel wins
Cost. cPanel's per-account pricing model means a server with 100 customer accounts needs their Premier tier at $49.50/mo, and more beyond that. NovaPanel is flat per-server: £4.99 a month and you're done. That's a £50/yr versus £600/yr decision once you're on a real-sized box.
Modern stack. NovaPanel is a single Go binary with Caddy as the reverse proxy — auto-TLS for every domain instantly, no AutoSSL config dance. cPanel is Perl + Apache, with TLS that requires you to think. Day-one operations are noticeably less fiddly.
Sane upgrade path. NovaPanel updates ship as a new binary fetched from our CDN and checked against the published SHA-256 before it replaces anything, with an automatic rollback if the new version will not start. cPanel updates have historically broken things. Our updater is one click; theirs is "schedule a maintenance window."
Where cPanel still wins (honestly)
Ecosystem. 20+ years of plugins, integrations, hosting-marketplace presence. If you need that one specific WHMCS module or your billing system was built around cPanel API quirks, switching cost is real.
Migration tooling. cPanel → cPanel transfers are scriptable, and cPanel's own tooling can pull accounts off a remote server for you. Ours cannot do that yet: you take a full account backup from cPanel, upload it in the panel, and it imports the account — sites, files, databases, mail with its stored messages, DNS records, forwarders and cron. That is one account at a time, and for a fleet of hundreds the difference matters. For a handful it is a few minutes each, and the dry run shows you exactly what it will create before it creates anything.
Familiarity. Your customers and staff might have learned cPanel a decade ago. NovaPanel's UI is cleaner (we think), but cleaner-but-different beats same-as-always for some users.
Realistic switch math
For a single VPS with under 100 customer accounts and no third-party billing-system entanglements, NovaPanel saves roughly £500/year per server over cPanel and gets you a noticeably nicer UI. The account importer handles the move, one account at a time. For larger fleets with deep cPanel integration, the honest answer is still to pilot it with a few accounts first — a hundred uploads is a hundred uploads until we can pull them off the old server directly, which is on the roadmap.
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