I have 2 servers running cpanel, and 1 running interworx. In all honesty, I much prefer interworx. Cpanel has far more features, though interworx is coming along. But I have a dual core opteron 64 running RHEL 64, and cpanel does not run well on 64 bit OS's currently. So I went looking for another control panel, and ended up buying interworx.
The thing I really hate about cpanel is that it completely takes over your server, and installs it's own versions of various software utilities. So you cannot use the standard OS version of apache and have to be very careful when running anything unusual like PHP5 and Apache2 as with cpanel, they have been in BETA for what seems like a lifetime.
The only things I dislike about interworx are the fact that you cannot allow customer accounts to edit their DNS records, that requires a reseller account (same as with cpanel), and it does not allow you to create normal end user accounts that support multiple domains (cpanel has that through addon domains). It does allow domain pointers.
Now, the thing I really like about interworx over cpanel are :-
It comes with a GUI for APF, and installs APF as part of the normal install.
Shell accounts can be run in a chroot environment. Much better than jail shell from cpanel.
It installs it's own version of php, just for the use of the panel, so you can install php5 on the main server if you wish.
It automatically installs SIM (System Integrity Monitor).
It has built in functionality to allow you to cluster servers together, which could be very useful for large forum or download sites.
So basically, interworx is more secure out of the box. The GUI looks much better than the cpanel one, and you don't have to do anything in perl to customize it (Cpanel uses a lot of perl for anyone that doesn't know). As it has a proper web services style interface, interworx is also much easier to control from billing systems and similar.
Overall, of the two, I would still tend to have a cpoanel server if I was hosting customers, but would be more likely to go with interworx by default, moving them to cpanel only when they asked. Generally, interworx just gives you a feeling of quality in use, and when you look at the structure of the system whereas cpanel gives the impression that it is held together with sticky tape.
Also, interworx comes with a fantastico style installer as standard, and full info on how to add your own auto install packages. I know cpanel also has a built in installer now (though still listed as BETA) but it has no documentation on how to add additional packages.
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Coop
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