Today choosing an ideal control panel for your hosting server can be quite a challenging task since there are so many players in this field. But two major ones are Parallels Plesk and cPanel. I will compare those two so you could find out which one suits your specific needs better.

1. Operating system. The first difference is the operating system both panels can be installed on. While cPanel is Linux based, Plesk Panel can be installed on both Linux and Windows operating systems.

cPanel supported operating systems are CentOS versions 5.x, 6.x, Red Hat® Enterprise and CloudLinux 5.x, 6.x.

Recommended Plesk supported operating systems are Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 (works with Windows Server 2012), CentOS 6.x (works with CentOS 5.x), CloudLinux 6.x (works with CloudLinux 5.x), RedHat Enterprise Linux 6.x (works with RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.x), Ubuntu 12.04 Server LTS, Debian 6.0, openSUSE 12.3, openSUSE 12.2.

2. System requirements.
System requirements for cPanel:

• 266MHz processor
• 512MB RAM (1GB is recommended when hosting a large number of accounts)
• 10GB Hard Disk

System requirements for Plesk:

for Linux 

• 512 MB of RAM (1 GB when hosting many accounts; 768MB minimum when also using Web Presence Builder)
• 10 GB Hard Disk

for Windows

• 1 GB of RAM (2 GB when hosting many accounts)
• 32 GB Hard Disk

3. Pricing. The pricing heavily depends on your provider (some of them may even offer control panels for free, covering their price by other services offered), but official prices are: Parallels Plesk - $39.99 on a dedicated server per month and cPanel - $425 annually on a dedicated and $200 on a VPS.

4. Troubleshooting and control. cPanel offers much more control options than Plesk does even in web interface and there are many scripts for automating  fixes. On the other hand this means that you can crash your system quite easily with wrong actions, while Plesk that features less control options via web-interface is much harder to break. Anyway both panels provide health monitoring tools like CPU, memory and disc space usage and a restart function as well. Plesk also has status indicators that quickly show if anything goes wrong in real time.

5. Features. File management, e-mail and database management are quite the same and provide all standard and easy-to-use functions, such as e-mail forwarding, mailing lists, anti-spam, editors in text/html/code, AW stats and others. Also there is a special version specially optimized for Virtual Servers in both panels. User interfaces in cPanel and Plesk are quite user-friendly and easy-to-use, but Plesk has different interface modes: the default and Power User Mode.

6. Advanced tools. The main difference between Plesk and cPanel becomes apparent in special tools provided. Plesk offers SiteBuilder with plenty of templates that allows a fully functional website to be created easily. It also has Google site search integrated and Google Adsense support. There is full support for site-staging and when used with SiteBuilder it allows fast modification of the duplicated site content and instant publication when it's ready. cPanel is not bundled with any site builder or site staging tool, though it includes a WYSIWYG editor for site creation and the site staging could be done manually. There are many free modules available for cPanel to install along with Google tools, but there is no centralized place for them unlike with Plesk. It comes with an application store that includes over 100 applications for different needs. Plesk also offers a Business Manager - an easy-to-use billing and automation solution for web hosts and resellers. cPanel doesn’t offer any billing system, though most of billing software solutions provide support for it.

Both Plesk and cPanel have their pros and cons but I tend more to Plesk Panel because of its  friendlier interface, Windows OS support and many special tools that are not included in the cPanel bundle. The choice is yours of course, and I'd be glad to know your opinion on them both. Feel free to share your thoughts below.

Author Bio
This article is written by Jack McCollins - a marketing and PR consultant at KickAssVPS, an established hosting company offering VPS and VDS services on Linux and Windows OS.