Hosting panel that gives every account its own containers
OpenPanel is a web hosting control panel built on the cPanel model: the administrator sets up accounts and plans in OpenAdmin, and each customer runs their sites from the OpenPanel interface. A traditional panel shares one Apache, one MySQL and one PHP runtime across every account on the server. OpenPanel gives each account its own containers instead, with a dedicated web server, database, PHP-FPM, private network and storage volume.
Since version 2.0, released in August 2026, new installs run on rootless Podman and pull from an image store shared by all accounts. Servers installed earlier on Docker stay on Docker.
Coolify and Openship start from an application's code and deploy it, the way Heroku does. OpenPanel starts from the hosting account. The self-hosted PaaS and hosting panel comparison lines up what each one installs on the server and what its paid tier holds back.
CPU, RAM and disk capped for each account
- One busy account can't drag down the rest: each hosting plan caps an account's CPU, RAM and disk, and the documentation says this keeps a single heavy site from taking the whole server down.
- Web server and PHP picked per account: Apache, Nginx, OpenResty or OpenLitespeed in the free edition, with several PHP versions side by side.
- Idle accounts cost little: the sizing guide puts an account with no traffic at about 15 MB of RAM and 100 MB of disk, because images are stored once for every account.
- One-command install:
bash <(curl -sSL https://openpanel.org), run as root. - WordPress manager and Let's Encrypt certificates are included in the free edition.
Free tier caps at three accounts; mail is paid
The free edition stops at three accounts. Community is free with no time limit and capped at 3 user accounts, 50 domains and 50 websites. It only runs on Ubuntu 24.04, on x86 CPUs, on a cloud server or VPS: other distributions, ARM and dedicated servers need Enterprise. Community gets monthly updates.
Email and reselling are Enterprise-only. Enterprise costs €14.95 a month or €149.50 a year, per server, whatever the number of accounts. Only Enterprise unlocks mailboxes, FTP, the REST API, reseller accounts, cPanel backup import, billing modules (WHMCS, FOSSBilling, Blesta and three others), Node.js, Python, Ruby and Java apps, MariaDB and PostgreSQL. Customer-managed backups and services, which the README highlights, are Enterprise features too. The 30-day trial needs no credit card.
Selling hosting requires that license. The LICENSE file puts OpenAdmin and the OpenPanel UI under an EULA that allows personal, non-commercial and internal business use, production included. Selling hosting to third parties requires an Enterprise license, and so does doing it with a fork. OpenCLI and the configuration files are CC BY-NC 4.0, which rules out commercial use as well. Yet the Community page calls OpenAdmin "100% open source", and restricts the free edition to private or personal use.
A clean server, and more RAM than the stated minimum. OpenPanel needs a full virtual machine or bare metal, with no other control panel or web server and a public IPv4 address; container-based VPS (OpenVZ, LXC) are not supported. The documentation lists 1 GB of RAM as the minimum, but its own sizing table counts 3 GB for one to three accounts without email. On 7 October 2026, the install test table in the README showed Debian 12 and Rocky Linux 10 failing.
One lead developer, ten releases in September. GitHub lists 14 releases, from 2.0.1 (6 August 2026) to 2.0.14 (5 October 2026), ten of them in September. One developer authored 10,077 of the 11,300 commits in a repository opened in February 2024.