Koapanel 0.38

Koapanel is a hosting control panel for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. We have tested it three times in three days, and each time it was a different product. First at version 0.20: good software, newly born. Then at 0.31, when per-account isolation arrived. This time at 0.38, after seven versions shipped in twenty-four hours.

The quickest way to tell the story is this: the flaws we listed in the two previous tests have nearly all fallen away.

Yesterday's flaws, checked today

We did not take the changelog's word for it: we tried the two things that changed the verdict.

"No Apache, no .htaccess" — that was the first reason to stay on cPanel or Plesk. From 0.33 it is enabled per site: nginx stays in front with the certificate and static files, Apache runs on the internal address only and executes PHP through the site's own pool, same user and same limits. We put a rewrite rule in an .htaccess and asked for the made-up address:

direct page:      php ok via Apache/2.4.58 (Ubuntu)
.htaccess rule:   php ok via Apache/2.4.58 (Ubuntu)

It works. Anyone migrating from shared hosting with ten years of .htaccess rules no longer has to rewrite them.

"No application installer" — from 0.32 there is a catalogue of eight: WordPress, WooCommerce, PrestaShop, Joomla, Drupal, Nextcloud, Matomo and Laravel, with official packages checked against the SHA-256 of a catalogue signed by Koapanel. We asked for Joomla on an empty site with a single call: Joomla 6.1.3 installed, home page and admin panel both answering 200, the page served in 50 ms. With one detail that says a lot about whoever wrote it: the panel refused "admin" as the administrator's name, asking for something less predictable.

And then, without our re-testing each one: PostgreSQL alongside MariaDB (0.34), Node.js and Python applications as services with Git deploy and the site's limits (0.35), passkeys and two-step sign-in (0.36), server alerts on Slack, Discord and Telegram (0.37) and moving an account to another server with mail, databases and DNS, in two passes and with a way back if anything goes wrong (0.38).

A correction we owe our readers

In the previous tests we wrote that the panel uses 14, then 21, then 15 MB of RAM. Those numbers came from systemd's MemoryCurrent, which also counts disk cache: while the server had just restarted they were nearly right, but the method was wrong.

This time we measured it properly, separating real memory from cache:

process memory (anon):    24 MB
file cache (reclaimable): 149 MB
cgroup total:            171 MB

The panel uses 24 megabytes. The 171 you see at a glance is almost all cache the kernel frees the moment it is needed. The figure to remember is unchanged — tens of megabytes, not hundreds — but the way to read it needed correcting, and we are writing that here instead of quietly changing the numbers.

How to read the score

The score on this page is the arithmetic mean of the dials above, rounded to one decimal. There is no editorial adjustment: if the dials change, the score changes. What the dials do not measure — the time a product has spent on real servers — is written in the flaws and in the lines below, where it can be read in full instead of hidden in a decimal.

The noisy neighbour

This is still the test that matters to anyone selling shared hosting, and it still holds: two accounts on a single-core VPS, one saturates the CPU, we measure the other one's site.

	neighbour idle	while the other saturates
Without the isolation module	5 ms	24 ms
With the module	5 ms	10 ms

With a 50% cap the offending account takes exactly 50% of the CPU. The sandbox holds: a site's PHP cannot list /var/www, cannot read the others' homes, cannot write to /etc or /run, and sees zero processes out of 213.

What it costs

	Koapanel	Plesk	cPanel
Billing	per server	per server	per account
Up to 10 sites	€7.90	€14.29 (Web Admin)	$35.99 (Admin, 5 accounts)
Up to 30 sites	€14.90	€25.49 (Web Pro)	$53.99 (Pro)
Unlimited sites	€24.90	€52.99 (Web Host)	$69.99 (100 accounts) + $0.49 each
Per-account isolation	included	—	CloudLinux, extra
App installer	included	extension	Softaculous, extra
Free tier	3 sites	no	no

Monthly prices, VAT excluded, September 2026 list prices; Plesk is the VPS licence. Over thirty-six months and thirty sites you go from about €1,690 on cPanel to €918 on Plesk to €536 on Koapanel — and the cPanel figure includes neither CloudLinux nor Softaculous.

What is still missing

LiteSpeed, and version selectors for Ruby: Node.js and Python are there now, but as site applications, not as CloudLinux-style interpreter selectors. No plain FTP, SFTP only — the right call, which you will still feel with customers who have had FileZilla configured for ten years. No WordPress multisite. And it is still Ubuntu 24.04 only: no Red Hat family, no Windows.

And now the real point

A year ago this review would have ended with "it still lacks this and that". Today it lacks almost nothing, and the problem has become a different one.

Seven versions shipped in twenty-four hours, and they were not touch-ups: they install Apache on the server, install PostgreSQL, create systemd services for Node and Python applications, move entire accounts between machines carrying mail and DNS along. Each of those, in a mature panel, is a feature that spends months in beta. Here they all arrived together, in one afternoon.

We are not saying it is badly written — everything we tried worked first time, and the safety mechanisms (signed updates with automatic rollback, predictable names refused, real isolation) show people who know what they are doing. We are saying that release speed is a risk, not a merit, and that here it is extreme. The new code has not met reality yet: odd servers, creative customers, configurations nobody anticipated. That is where control panels break, and time — not talent — is the only thing that finds out.

So the score goes up — the features are genuinely there and the price is what it is — but no number on this page measures time, and time is the one thing missing here. If you had to move clients' sites onto it tomorrow morning, that is what we would look at, not the scores.

Who it is for

Anyone selling shared hosting on Ubuntu who today pays for cPanel plus CloudLinux plus Softaculous: the financial comparison is not even interesting any more, it is over. Put it on a real server with real but non-critical customers, keep the backups off the server, and give yourself a few months before moving the ones who pay most.

Anyone running their own sites or an agency's: it is already the richest option for the money, and the free three-site tier has everything.

Anyone who needs the panel to be boring — because a sysadmin who will move on in six months has to use it, because the client is a bank, because you cannot afford a surprise: wait. Not because anything is missing, but because boring is earned over time, and this product is three weeks old.

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