Why Plesk is a Better Choice Than cPanel

Web hosting and server administration has always been a hobby of mine and something that I've always taken a lot of interest in. Recently, I decided to take a dive into Plesk. In the past I never really gave it much of a chance, but curiosity and boredom got the best of me and I decided now is the time to do so. It's been about a month now so I think a little review and comparison to it's rival cPanel is in order. Most of the comparisons I see are very biased and mostly emotional arguments. So, I'm going to throw bias and emotions aside and give my honest comparison of the softwares. I'll note that I've been running Plesk on a CentOS 6 VPS which is hosting a few websites of mine.

Operating System Support

One of the most obvious advantages to Plesk can be seen just by looking at the features on their website. Plesk is available for both Windows and Linux operating systems and is also available on a number of different Linux distributions.

With cPanel you are limited to a select group of Linux distro's. This gives Plesk an obvious advantage if you're in the hosting business and plan on expanding into Windows or Linux hosting allowing you to manage everything from one place.

User Interface

Another area Plesk gets the upper hand is with it's user interface/user experience. Plesk seemlessly integrates all aspects of server management from the domain level to the server administration level in one single interface. Contrast with cPanel that uses 2 seperate interfaces, cPanel for the domain level and WHM for reseller and server admin level.

Having everything handled in one simple interface makes management much easier. This also makes the learning curve less steep for new users transitions from domain level to reseller and reseller to server administration.