Koapanel 0.21
Fourteen megabytes of RAM, and it does almost everything Plesk does.
Daniele Bambagioni · 25 September 2026 · 4 min read
Koapanel is an Ubuntu control panel that costs a third of cPanel and weighs about as much as a browser extension. What it lacks is mileage.
What we liked
- +Fourteen megabytes of RAM for the panel: on a 2 GB VPS almost all of it stays with the sites.
- +One price per server rather than per account: €14.90 a month for up to 30 sites.
- +Every site gets its own Unix user and PHP pool, with open_basedir and shell functions disabled.
- +Ed25519-signed updates that roll themselves back if the new version does not answer within 60 seconds.
- +Migration from cPanel, Plesk and DirectAdmin included, with a final sync right before the DNS switch.
- +Italian and English interface that genuinely works on a phone.
What we didn't
- −It has only just shipped: version 0.21, no fleet of servers running it in production for months, no independent security audit.
- −Ubuntu 24.04 and nginx only: no Apache with .htaccess, no LiteSpeed, no CloudLinux.
- −No FTP (deliberately) and no WordPress multisite.
- −No ecosystem: there are no third-party extensions and no independent security audit.
What it is
Koapanel is a hosting control panel for Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. It creates isolated PHP sites, installs and maintains WordPress, and handles MariaDB databases, DNS, Let's Encrypt certificates, backups, mail, firewall and antimalware from a single web interface. It positions itself as a cheaper alternative to Plesk and cPanel, with a different pricing model: you pay per server, not per account.
Under the hood it is a single 19.5 MB Go binary that also carries the React interface. No external database for the panel, no helper daemons: install it, start it, and it uses fourteen megabytes of memory.
Fourteen megabytes
We tested version 0.20.0, and re-checked on 0.21.1, on a 1 vCPU, 2 GB VPS running Ubuntu 24.04.5 with three live sites. With nginx, MariaDB and PHP-FPM running, the panel process held 14 MB of resident memory: less than fail2ban (22 MB), less than PHP-FPM (24 MB), a quarter of MariaDB (54 MB). The whole server was using 611 MB out of 1,961.
For scale: Plesk's own documentation asks for a minimum of 1 GB of RAM plus 1 GB of swap, cPanel's for 2 GB minimum and 4 recommended. Those are requirements for the full stack rather than the weight of the panel alone, so it is not a like-for-like comparison — but it does say which league each one plays in.
Ten sample API calls answered in 3.4 ms median, between 3.0 and 3.9 ms.
What it does well
Isolation between sites is the serious kind. Every site gets its own Unix user and PHP-FPM pool, with open_basedir on its home, private sessions and temp directories, and exec and system disabled. nginx logs live outside the site's home, so there is no symlink attack on files root has open. If one step of site creation fails, every earlier step is rolled back.
Updates know how to go back. The agent fetches a manifest over HTTPS, accepts only valid ed25519 signatures, checks the binary's sha256 and size, and before restarting it launches a verifier that restores the previous version if the new one has not confirmed its health within 60 seconds. This is the sort of thing the big panels learned to do after a few disasters.
Migration is included, not a paid add-on. From cPanel, Plesk and DirectAdmin, from a backup file or over SSH, with mailboxes complete with their messages and — when the backup allows it — their original password. There is a final sync up to seven days later, to run right before moving the DNS.
WordPress gets its own section, with three cache layers (nginx, private Redis, OPcache), updates with automatic rollback, staging and one-click wp-admin login. Plesk's equivalent is WP Toolkit, which comes in a reduced edition on Web Admin.
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 |
| 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.
What it does not do
Let us be blunt: this is a brand-new product. The version we tested is 0.21: there is no fleet of servers that have been running it in production for months, there is no independent security audit, and a control panel runs as root and creates system users. This is exactly the kind of software you want to see put some miles on it before you hand it your clients' sites.
Then come the stated limits, which are choices: Ubuntu 24.04 only, nginx only. No Apache with complicated .htaccess rules, no LiteSpeed, no CloudLinux — and anyone reselling shared hosting on CloudLinux has no option here. No plain FTP, SFTP only: correct, but if your customers have had FileZilla configured for ten years you will hear about it. No WordPress multisite.
We did find one technical flaw while measuring: the interface was served uncompressed, 1.5 MB on first load. It was fixed while we were writing. From 0.21 the panel compresses with Brotli and splits the code into several files: first load is down to 187 KB, eight times less. We are leaving this in because it says two things — that the flaw was there, and how long it took them to close it.
Who it is for
Anyone running their own sites, or an agency's, on Ubuntu VPSs, using nginx and PHP, living inside WordPress, and looking at the panel licence line every month wondering why it costs as much as the server. There the maths is brutal: the free three-site tier is not a crippled edition, it has every feature.
Anyone reselling serious shared hosting, anyone who depends on CloudLinux or LiteSpeed, anyone who needs the panel to be boring and familiar to whichever sysadmin they hire next — the answer today is no. In a year, maybe a different one.
Koapanel is a Prime Software product. The tests and measurements are ours and can be reproduced with the commands above.
The lab's numbers.
Same tests, same day, same data centre for every server in the same price range.
The panel weighs less than fail2ban.
Resident memory read from systemd on Ubuntu 24.04, 1 vCPU and 2 GB, with three live sites. Lower is better.
A little over half of Plesk, less than a third of cPanel.
Public list prices, September 2026, VAT excluded. cPanel Pro is $53.99, converted here at €1 = $1.15.
Over three years the gap buys you another server.
Today's monthly prices times 36 months, before the increases the competitors have already announced.
Every number
can be reproduced at home.
Public tools, the same commands on every server.
$ systemctl show panel-agent -p MemoryCurrent $ curl -sk -o /dev/null -w '%{time_total}\n' https://127.0.0.1:8443/api/v1/meta $ free -m; /usr/local/bin/panel-agent version
Well designed, still to be road-tested. Koapanel does the right things — real isolation between sites, updates that know how to go back, a price that does not grow with your customers — and it does them in fourteen megabytes. But it has only just shipped: put it on a test server, not on your clients' sites, and let's talk again in six months.
Written with the help of artificial intelligence and checked by the editors (EU AI Act, art. 50). Source: koapanel.app.