SixPanel vs CloudPanel
CloudPanel is a lean, well-engineered general-purpose panel. SixPanel runs one application. If you are choosing between them, the question is not which is better software — it is which problem you are solving.
What CloudPanel is better at
CloudPanel is deliberately light and it shows: a clean interface, low overhead, sensible defaults, and first-class support for several stacks — PHP, Node, Python, static sites — with per-site isolation and its own user per site.
It hosts many unrelated sites on one server. It integrates cleanly with the big cloud providers' object storage and DNS. Its own documentation is genuinely good. And because it is opinionated in a modern way, a hand-tuned CloudPanel site is a nice place to live.
If your server hosts more than 6amMart, CloudPanel is a better fit than SixPanel — and SixPanel will refuse to install alongside it rather than compete for ports 80 and 443.
CloudPanel is also the better choice if you value understanding your own stack: it stays close to a normal Linux server, so what you learn there is transferable in a way panel-specific knowledge is not.
Where a general panel stops short for 6amMart
CloudPanel gives you an excellent PHP site. 6amMart needs more than an excellent PHP site, and nothing about that is CloudPanel's fault — it has no reason to know this application:
- A permanently running queue worker. Without it, order notifications, emails and push messages are queued and never sent. Nothing errors. The order arrives and nobody is told.
- The scheduler, run every minute by cron. Without it, campaigns never start and subscriptions never renew.
- A websocket process on a port your proxy actually carries — 443 behind Cloudflare. Configure the commonly-suggested port instead and live order tracking silently never connects.
- Uploads served straight from
storage/app/public. The standardstorage:linkstep does not apply here and can break image serving rather than enable it. - Backups holding exactly the database,
.envand the uploads tree — and a restore you have actually run, not just scheduled. - Knowing that much of 6amMart's configuration lives in its database, not
.env. Editing the environment file for mail or payment settings changes nothing.
All of it is doable on CloudPanel. It is configuration you write, document and remember. On SixPanel it is the starting state.
One concrete capability difference
MariaDB 10.11 on Ubuntu 26.04 or Debian 13. MariaDB's own repository setup script refuses those releases, and CloudPanel installs the database natively onto the host — so on the newest systems that specific version is not available to it.
SixPanel comes in two runtimes. The recommended one installs nginx, PHP-FPM, MariaDB and Redis directly from the release's own archive and supervises them with systemd — nothing is containerised, but nothing consults MariaDB's script either, so it takes 11.8 on Ubuntu 26.04 and Debian 13 and 10.11 on Ubuntu 24.04, and installs on all three. SixPanel Docker runs the same stack as Docker Compose services, with PHP 8.4 and mariadb:10.11 as container images, so the host's package list is never consulted at all — which is what makes it the way to put 10.11 specifically onto a release whose archive does not carry it.
An earlier version of this page made more of that than it should. It said 10.11 was the version this codebase is tested against and the container was the only route to it on the newest systems. The version claim has since been measured out — 10.11 against 11.8, on identical servers with the same shop, is a wash — so what remains is a narrow capability difference rather than a reason to pick a runtime. What has not changed is the engine: MySQL is not interchangeable with MariaDB here, on either panel.
We have not benchmarked CloudPanel
That is a capability difference, not a performance one. We have measured SixPanel against a fully tuned aaPanel and against our own container runtime — the whole three-way comparison is here — and CloudPanel was not in it. No speed claim about CloudPanel appears anywhere on this site, in either direction, and anyone who makes one owes you their method.
What that round does say to a CloudPanel owner
Not that CloudPanel is slow. It says what is worth checking on any panel, because the gap we did measure turned out to be settings rather than software.
Against a fully tuned aaPanel, SixPanel served 6amMart's API 1.76× faster at one request and 1.82× faster with four arriving at once. About 60% of that traced to a single PHP setting — the directory restriction, open_basedir — which costs a fixed 16 to 26 ms on every request and disables PHP's path cache outright: 5,862 filesystem lookups per request with it on, 214 with it off. About 8% was the wrong JIT mode, which is a four-digit code rather than an on/off switch, so a tuning script that only asks "is JIT enabled?" leaves the wrong one in place. The PHP version was worth nothing at all. About 32% is unexplained, and is published as unexplained.
None of that is specific to aaPanel, so those are the two values worth reading back on your own box — and reading them back through the process that actually serves requests. On the aaPanel machine the real directory-restriction value lived in a per-directory file that four other places did not show, the command line among them.
The restriction is a genuine security feature, which is why we checked whether SixPanel is simply trading safety for speed rather than assuming it. That audit is on the same page.
How to choose
Choose CloudPanel if the box hosts more than this one shop, if you want a light general panel you can reason about, or if you already run it and like it.
Choose SixPanel if this server exists for one 6amMart shop and you would rather the six items above already be correct than make them correct yourself.
Either way, check the result
SixPreflight is free and read-only. Run it against the finished server and it will tell you which of those six are genuinely in place — including the ones that fail without any visible symptom. Worth doing on any panel, including ours.
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