cPanel vs. Microsoft IIS

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
cPanel
Score 9.9 out of 10
N/A
cPanel headquartered in Houston provides website hosting providers with workload and server automation, as well as a management console for creating and launching websites, managing email and web files, and other administrative tasks.
$15.99
per month for 1 account
Microsoft IIS
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft IIS is an application server and infrastructure.N/A
Pricing
cPanelMicrosoft IIS
Editions & Modules
cPanel Solo
$15.99
per month for 1 account
Admin
$24.99
per month up to 5 accounts
Pro
$35.99
per month up to 30 accounts
Premier (on cloud)
$53.99
per month up to 100 accounts
Premier (on metal)
$53.99
per month up to 100 accounts
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
cPanelMicrosoft IIS
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
cPanelMicrosoft IIS
Features
cPanelMicrosoft IIS
Application Servers
Comparison of Application Servers features of Product A and Product B
cPanel
-
Ratings
Microsoft IIS
7.5
Ratings
5% below category average
IDE support00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Security management00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Administration and management00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Application server performance00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Installation00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Open-source standards compliance00 Ratings5.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
cPanelMicrosoft IIS
Small Businesses
NinjaOne
NinjaOne
Score 9.0 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
NinjaOne
NinjaOne
Score 9.0 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
VMware vCenter
VMware vCenter
Score 8.7 out of 10
NGINX
NGINX
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
cPanelMicrosoft IIS
Likelihood to Recommend
9.2
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
7.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
7.8
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.3
(0 ratings)
9.4
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
cPanelMicrosoft IIS
Likelihood to Recommend
I would recommend cPanel as it is a good tool for a medium-sized business. The licensing costs can be a bit high but you mostly get what you pay for. If you have a bit more of a large or complex web site/structure, there is a bit of a learning curve for administrators. Once you know what you're doing, it does what it does very well.
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IIS as a web application server is perfectly suited for .net, .net core, asp.net applications. Our core ESB runs on IIS and has hundreds of gigabytes of data moved through it every day spread across millions of transactions. We have other mission critical applications that deliver our results to patients and doctors relying on IIS web application servers. If you stay in the Microsoft development stack, IIS is a top tier, efficient, and reliable web server.
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Pros
  • cPanel nicely organizes functions into categories on its main first screen for easy location.
  • cPanel works nativity with WHM (Web Host Manager) to easily create new web hosting accounts.
  • cPanel integrates well with common website technologies like WordPress, Joomla, or Magento.
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  • A big advantage that we use all the time is reviewing the logs that automatically get generated in IIS. It has helped us troubleshoot various problems in our applications over the years.
  • IIS integrates really well with Visual Studio and TFS. We are able to quickly deploy new applications and changes to applications when requested by the business.
  • IIS has proven that it is easy to configure and maintain with minimal effort.
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Cons
  • The costs can be a limiting factor for some businesses if you are not using a web hosting company that uses it. I have been experimenting with Cloud hosting, which can be very daunting for the novice. There is an option to install it on the cloud but it is expensive.
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  • For some web applications, it takes additional time to configure IIS to make a website work.
  • IIS logging - it is not the strongest side of the product.
  • Compared to Apache or Nginx, IIS uses way more system resources.
  • Even with regular patches, IIS has many vulnerabilities.
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Likelihood to Renew
No answers on this topic
We have no intention to replace all applications running on top of the IIS platform. Not all applications support other platforms and not all support staff are skilled in Linux/Apache platform support. Whereas IIS may not be the best performing or most secure web platform available, for the aforementioned reasons, it is impossible not to continue use of this product.
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Usability
Although it can be a little bit bloated with a lot of options and configurations, it's very straightforward to use and maintain. So it's a great option even if you don't have large experience in hosting configuration. The WHM tool is more suited to heavy users since it requires more expertise, so it has a steep learning curve to better understand how to use it.
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In general, Microsoft IIS is an alright product. It comes natively with Windows Server. It has good enough GUI to set things up & tweak things around. Once properly setup, it runs stably enough. And with enough Powershell magic, having a CI/CD pipeline to automatically deploy a new version of the application is doable.
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Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
ARR (application request routing) in Microsoft IIS Server enables the web-admins to increase the web app reliability and availability through the rule based routing and load balancing of HTTP requests which in turn provides highly available server. IIS 7.0 Manager also provides kernel as well as user mode caching for faster performance and in case if the server fails, the IIS server has good amount of details logged in its log files which help understand and debug the cause quickly. Load balancing facilitates IIS server to fight against availability issues.
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Performance
No answers on this topic
In my experience, I have never had significant issues with IIS performance. Sometimes I've experienced issues with loading time, but it is mostly related to the web site code. However Amazon, Microsoft and Google providing free cloud services with very limited resources, and in that scenario, "heavy" websites on IIS could be the issue. In other situations - performance is good.
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Support Rating
The documentation available for all cPanel features and functionality is vast, comprehensive, and covers all the basics required to manage the web site hosting environment. User support forums are very helpful, and are packed with years of content and comments answering any questions or answers I have ever had. When needed, direct customer support has been quick and efficient.
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As mentioned earlier there is so much documentation or guides or stack overflow questions out there that someone will have faced the same or very similar scenario to what you are going through that you will almost certainly find a solution to what you are after.
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Alternatives Considered
Really there aren't many options. There is a free one that I haven't used but from what I hear is that it is very limited on functionality. I also have tried Plesk, never bought but tried it. It seemed easier in a few things but also seemed more simplistic and I like my workflow with cPanel better and it works well with litespeed server.
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On Windows, Microsoft IIS is easier to implement and maintain than Apache web service. Normally if you need to host PHP or other apache native content on a Windows server, it's recommended to use WAMP or equivalent software to simplify the installation, administration, and configuration of resources. However, you can use Microsoft IIS and other web services on the same server, taking care to keep separate folders and port usage for each system.
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Scalability
No answers on this topic
Microsoft IIS Server is scalable if the underlying server configuration is done correctly. Use x64 edition v/s 32bit and using 32bit mode application pools are some of the tweaks to be done to make the IIS server scalable. There are too many small configurations need to be carried out in order to make a highly scalable IIS server hence not giving full score in this area.
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Return on Investment
  • Saved hundreds of hours of labor and expense due to the excellent backups of each site. Sites crash so backups are a must and this platform delivers.
  • Streamlined domain management allows me to quickly put up sites and profit.
  • Eliminated the cost of outsourcing monitoring websites with the tools inside the panel.
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  • Speed of development. You don't need to be an expert to expose your website through some DNS
  • Robust, there has never been any downtime because of IIS itself.
  • The ease of use can have (and has had) some negative impact because it's too easy to implement something, and then forget. When a server is taken down, those unthoughtful implementations come to light the hard way.
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ScreenShots