Free Softaculous exists. But not for everyone, and not forever.

"Softaculous free" is a search a lot of people make, and this time the answer is not a flat no: a free licence really does exist. But it comes with three limits worth knowing before you count on it.

Softaculous's free licence, for real

Softaculous offers a free licence, one per server, with no renewal, covering 59 scripts. The paid Premium licence unlocks the whole catalogue, which the site puts at over 380 applications.

Fifty-nine is not few: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, PrestaShop and most of what an agency installs in a year are in there. For many people that is enough.

The limits are three others.

First: you need a supported panel. The free licence, like Premium, applies to cPanel, Plesk, DirectAdmin and the other panels Softaculous supports out of the box. If your server does not run one of those, you cannot use it.

Second: on your own panel, you pay. If you build your own panel and want Softaculous inside it, the route is the custom-panel integration, and the bill goes to whoever makes the panel: according to the developer documentation, $0.10 per user per month with a $100 per month minimum, plus the PHP core and ionCube-encoded files on every customer server. The free licence does not apply there.

Third: it is another application inside yours. Softaculous's interface is its own: another look, another logic, another thing to update.

The commercial alternative, Installatron Server, is API-first and cleaner to integrate, but costs $999 a year for the first 1,000 managed sites.

How many scripts do you actually need

Here is the point nobody says out loud: of those 380 scripts, how many do you install in a year? If you are an agency or a small host, the honest answer is five or six, always the same ones. WordPress, nearly always. WooCommerce. PrestaShop. Joomla on some older site. Every so often a Nextcloud or a Laravel.

The huge catalogue serves two purposes: looking good in the comparison table, and covering the rare customer who asks for that one thing. Both are legitimate — but neither is the same as daily use.

A panel with the installer built in

As of this week Koapanel — a panel for Ubuntu 24.04 — has an application installer included in the price, with no separate licence. The catalogue is eight applications: WordPress, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Joomla, Drupal, Nextcloud, Matomo and Laravel.

Eight against 59 against 380: on quantity there is no contest, and it is only fair to say so up front. What we checked is how it installs them.

We tried it: an empty site, a single call, and Joomla 6.1.3 installed — home page and admin panel both answering, the page served in 50 ms. The packages are the official ones, checked against the SHA-256 of a signed catalogue that updates itself without updating the panel; each application gets a dedicated database and is installed with its own official tool (wp-cli, the PrestaShop and Joomla installers, drush, occ, artisan) under the site's user. Updates take a copy of files and database first, and roll themselves back if anything goes wrong.

And one detail we liked: asked to create the administrator as "admin", the panel refused, asking for something less predictable. That is the kind of care that, in an application installer, is worth more than twenty extra scripts.

The arithmetic, per server

	Cost	Applications
Softaculous free	€0	59, supported panels only
Softaculous Premium	list price, per server	380+
Installatron Server	$999 a year (up to 1,000 sites)	wide
Softaculous on your own panel	from $100 a month	380+
Koapanel	included in the panel, from €0	8

Who should do what

If you have cPanel or Plesk and 59 scripts are enough: take Softaculous's free licence and stop thinking about it. It is the right answer and there is no better one.

If you need the whole catalogue because customers ask for everything: pay for Premium, that is its job.

If you are choosing a panel right now, look at how many applications you actually install in a year before weighing a 380-strong catalogue. If it is the usual five, a panel that installs those well — verified packages, updates that know how to go back — serves you better than a catalogue you never open.

The Koapanel review, with every measurement · Free CloudLinux does not exist: here is what you can have

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Koapanel is a Prime Software product. The tests and measurements are ours and can be reproduced with the commands given in the review.