aaPanel is the smoother product; CyberPanel is the more transparent one. aaPanel installs in minutes, has by far the larger application catalogue, and stays genuinely free for core use — but its Pro tier runs $198 a year, several components are closed, and its lineage traces to BT Panel in China. CyberPanel is fully open, gives you OpenLiteSpeed and its caching layer, and publishes what it fixes — including a July 2026 release that patched two cross-tenant backup flaws. Both run on Ubuntu and on AlmaLinux or Rocky, and both include Docker.
The niche they share
These two get compared constantly because they occupy almost the same position: free, RHEL-family capable, container-aware, aimed at the person running their own server rather than at a hosting company with a compliance department. If you have narrowed the field to these two, the generic advice about "choosing a panel" is behind you and the decision comes down to four specifics.
1. Web server and performance
CyberPanel is built around LiteSpeed. OpenLiteSpeed ships free, and the LiteSpeed cache plugin for WordPress caches inside the web server rather than inside PHP, which is why it outperforms plugin-level caching that has to boot WordPress before deciding to serve a cached page. If your workload is WordPress under real traffic, that is the strongest single argument on this page.
aaPanel takes the conventional route — one-click LAMP and LEMP stacks, meaning Apache or Nginx with PHP-FPM. Perfectly fast when tuned, and more familiar to most administrators, but it does not have an equivalent to LiteSpeed's cache integration.
Worth knowing if you are already on CyberPanel: version 2.4.9 ships OpenLiteSpeed core 2.5.1, which fixes a segfault on 4xx responses that was producing random Cloudflare 520 errors. If you have been chasing intermittent 520s behind Cloudflare, that release is the fix.
2. Application catalogue
This is aaPanel's home ground and it is not close. The software store is the reason people install it — one-click deployments across web software, databases, caching, monitoring and more than a hundred extensions, with a UI that makes installing things feel safe. For a personal server that accumulates tools over time, that convenience compounds.
CyberPanel's application story is thinner and leans on its Docker manager instead. That is a reasonable answer, and it is arguably the more durable one — a container you can inspect and limit beats a package installed by a script into your system — but it is more work per application.
3. Security record and what it implies
CyberPanel's history has one very bad chapter and a much better present. CVE-2024-51378 was an unauthenticated remote code execution — command injection reachable without a login, CVSS 9.8. Roughly 22,000 instances were vulnerable, and at least three ransomware operations exploited it, including PSAUX along with Babuk- and Conti-derived families. Servers were encrypted and left with cryptominers.
Its July 2026 release reads very differently: 2.4.9 fixed two cross-tenant backup flaws — an authenticated user could cancel and delete another tenant's running backups, and view, delete or restore another tenant's incremental snapshots — plus command injection, SQL injection, path traversal and privilege escalation across several endpoints, and pinned stack binaries to SHA256 checksums with automatic rollback. Those cross-tenant bugs are exactly the class that matters on a shared box.
aaPanel's position is harder to evaluate, and that is the finding rather than an accusation. The core is open but the Pro extensions are not, and the panel descends from BT Panel in mainland China. Community reports have raised questions about telemetry and outbound connections. We have not verified those claims and are not presenting them as fact — but the relevant question for a business is not whether they are true. It is whether you can demonstrate they are false to a customer or an auditor. Under GDPR and NIS2, that burden sits with you.
Note the asymmetry in how these two are assessed. CyberPanel's failures are documented because its fixes are published; you can read exactly what was wrong. That transparency makes its record look worse on a search results page and better on a risk assessment.
4. What the money looks like
| aaPanel | CyberPanel | |
|---|---|---|
| Free edition | Free forever, no stated site or database limits | Free, full panel |
| Paid tier | $28.80/mo, $198/yr, or $699 lifetime | Optional add-ons; LiteSpeed Enterprise licensed separately |
| What paying adds | WAF, analytics, anti-tampering, WordPress tools, team accounts, priority support | Mainly the Enterprise web server |
| Licence model | Open core, closed Pro extensions | Open source |
The practical reading: aaPanel's free edition is more capable than most free tiers, and the features a production host tends to want — the WAF, tamper protection, team accounts — sit behind $198 a year. CyberPanel's paid path is narrower and mostly about the Enterprise web server, which you only buy if you have measured a reason to.
Where both disappoint
Email. Neither has a mail stack in the class of what ISPConfig or HestiaCP ship. CyberPanel includes mail and it works, but deliverability tuning is consistently the weakest part of the product; aaPanel treats mail as an extension rather than a core concern. If selling mailboxes is part of your plan, both of these will cost you evenings.
Isolation is the other shared gap. Both give you PHP-FPM pools and Unix permissions; neither confines a compromised site with kernel-level controls. That is the honest limit of free panels generally, and it is the reason commercial ones exist — Panelica, for example, layers cgroup v2 ceilings and namespace isolation under each account on both distribution families. If you host only your own projects, that gap may cost you nothing and the free options are the rational pick.
Choosing
Take aaPanel if you want the fastest path from bare VPS to working services, value the application catalogue, and no governance conversation is going to happen about your management software.
Take CyberPanel if you are WordPress-heavy and want LiteSpeed caching for free, if you prefer a fully open codebase with published advisories, or if the origin question matters to your customers. Commit to updating promptly and keep the panel off the public internet — the 2024 incident became a mass event largely because tens of thousands of admin interfaces were reachable from anywhere.
Frequently asked questions
Is aaPanel or CyberPanel better?
aaPanel for the larger application catalogue and a smoother interface; CyberPanel for OpenLiteSpeed performance, an open codebase and published security advisories. Both run on Ubuntu and RHEL-family systems and both include Docker management.
Is aaPanel really free?
The free edition is permanently free with no stated limits on sites or databases. Pro costs $28.80 per month, $198 per year, or $699 as a one-time lifetime licence, and includes the web application firewall, analytics, anti-tampering, advanced WordPress features and team accounts.
Is CyberPanel safe to run in 2026?
On a current version, yes. The 2024 unauthenticated RCE that led to mass ransomware was patched, and version 2.4.9 in July 2026 fixed further issues including two cross-tenant backup flaws. As with any control panel, keep it updated and restrict access to the admin interface.
Which one is faster for WordPress?
CyberPanel, in most cases, because OpenLiteSpeed with the LiteSpeed cache plugin serves cached pages from the web server rather than from inside PHP. aaPanel with a well-tuned Nginx and a good caching plugin narrows the difference but does not have an equivalent integration.
Do both support AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux?
Yes. Both run on RHEL-family distributions as well as Ubuntu, which is what distinguishes them from HestiaCP, which is Debian and Ubuntu only.