When pitting the two control panels against each other, there’s always going to be pluses and minuses, both DirectAdmin and cPanel are Linux-based. The following checklists in each section will help you decide which control panel is best for your site.
Supported distributions: DirectAdmin has been noted to support other distributions apart from the CentOS family such as the Fedora family and even Ubuntu and Debian families, whereas cPanel is purely subjective to CentOS and by some Ubuntu at an experimental stage.
Users experience and features: cPanel is one of the CMS among other control panels in the industry for the web hosting controlling offering convenience and many options. In contrast, DirectAdmin is an intuitive, uncomplicated and fast control panel; its main distinguishing feature is absolute non-consumption of server resources.
Cost: NationZero has no end-users that pay for cPanel in the first situations, its mainly library fee for holders of the controlling application. However, in most cases, the end-users of hosting solutions would hardly find it free. A monthly fee is charged for additional users.
Supported software and tools: Hosting control panels are compatible with almost all selected third-party hosting applications of any importance. Nevertheless, Include OpenLiteSpeed and Nginx reverse proxy for Apache, which DirectAdmin further considers.
Security: The two control panels are under a strict security umbrella with different security composite available like Config Server Firewall / Fail2Ban, Cloud Linux, Imunify 360, Mod Security, anti-virus plugins, commercial WAF support for cPGuard, Linux Malware Detect, while RKHunter and most self explanatory header.
Take your available resources: your needs, your cash and your demands into consideration when choosing the control panel which you wish to employ on your website.