The control panel is an application designed to control and manages your Web site hosting. Through the control panel you can manage activities such as domain administration, website design, email creation, opening of your FTP accounts, statistics reports, etc. You might know that there are many different control panels out there; some more popular than others. It is hard to say which of them is better than the others as each control panel has its advantages and disadvantages. Here we review some of the major CPs and leave it to readers to choose what is best for them.

 
cPanel occupies the number one place among the control panels, because of its many features with easy operation. Cpanel tends to be the easiest to learn both admin side and client side.
cPanel has been around for a very long time and recently have added better support for Windows and service clustering. However, these newer additions still have their bugs that need to be worked out. The users complain about its resource usages, particularly for low end VPS users. For VPS hosting with less than 250 MB RAM, it is not advised to use cPanel.
 
DirectAdmin is another control panel serving Linux platform. It is becoming more popular these days because of its simplicity. Compared to cPanel, it doesn’t have as many bells and whistles but it makes up for it with how stable it runs and because of lower resource usages. It tends to break less often than cPanel perhaps because it has fewer features that have had their bugs ironed out.
 

DirectAdmin is typically used by Budget hosts because of its ability to host more clients than cpanel while still remaining stable. Though it claims to have more features, it needs a lot of improvements to match the other control panels.

H-Sphere is another control panel for both Linux and Windows. Through H-Sphere is widely used by the Web hosting sites, it lacks some features when compared to Plesk and cPanel. It used to be popular one back in the old time because it offered features that the other control panels could not at the time. However, the popular control panels have all caught up to Hsphere. But it still has some good features like the billing system built into the control panel.
It has the highest learning curve out of all the control panels available now. Users most read through all the documentation before they can understand how it works. Because of this, technical support is usually hammered by users who have either messed up their website or have no clue how to start it.
 
 

Plesk/Parallels is available for both Linux and Windows platforms. Plesk has been around for a very long time and has many features available that other control panels don’t offer. Plesk has better clustering support than cPanel. With Plesk, you could setup a network of different servers that all act as one service together. For instance, you could run both a Linux and Windows based hosting platform (one Linux server + one Windows server) while having separate database and email servers that can all run together as one unit.
Plesk has a higher learning curve both for the end user and the admin because of these advanced features. If you are brand new to web hosting and are just starting, it would take longer for you to get running on Plesk than on cpanel. However, once you learn how to navigate and use Plesk, you might be better off because of its unique extra features like SiteBuilder and clustering support.
 
Other available CPs…
Helm is a Windows only Web hosting control panel. The Helm control panel has many customer friendly features and the most striking feature is the billing information. Except the H-sphere, all most all the commonly used control panels don't provide billing information inside the control panel.
 
 

Hosting Accelerator is another Windows only Web hosting control panel. It offers a lot of features, but the interface isn'tt properly though out and it lacks in extra feature. It suits the seasoned users.
 
 

Interworx has many features. Inteworx is dedicated to the Linux platform and has a clean interface
 
 

Ensim, another control panel for both Windows and Linux, has to cover more ground when compared to other Web hosting control panels serving both Linux and Windows.
As per the ratings, cPanel is preferred for Linux platform and Helm control panel is preferred for Windows platforms.