# SixPanel vs aaPanel > Source: https://www.allsweb.com/compare/sixpanel-vs-aapanel > Markdown for agents: https://www.allsweb.com/compare/sixpanel-vs-aapanel.md > Publisher: AllsWeb (www.allsweb.com) Part of: Comparisons aaPanel is a mature, general-purpose hosting panel. SixPanel runs one application. Those are different products aimed at different problems, and the honest comparison is about which problem you have. ## What aaPanel is better at Nearly everything that is not 6amMart. It hosts many unrelated sites on one box, each in its own directory and each able to run its own PHP version. It runs WordPress, plain PHP, Node and Python apps side by side. It manages mail. It has a file manager, a store of one-click applications, and years of forum answers behind every problem you will hit. If your server has to do more than one job — a shop plus a marketing site plus a client's project — aaPanel is the correct answer and SixPanel is the wrong one. SixPanel will not even install next to it; it checks and refuses rather than fighting over ports 80 and 443. aaPanel is also the safer choice if you already know it. A tool you can navigate at 2 a.m. during an outage beats a better-suited tool you have never used. ## What a general panel cannot do for 6amMart Not because aaPanel is deficient — because it has no reason to know what 6amMart is. It gives you a correct PHP site. 6amMart needs more than a correct PHP site: - **A queue worker running permanently.** Otherwise order notifications, emails and push messages never leave. No error appears; the restaurant simply never hears about the order. - **The scheduler on a one-minute cron.** Otherwise campaigns never start and subscriptions never renew. - **A websocket process, on a port a proxy will actually carry.** Behind Cloudflare that means 443. Configure the port most guides suggest and live order tracking never connects. - **Uploads served from `storage/app/public` directly** — the usual `storage:link` step does not apply and can break image serving. - **Backups that hold everything a rebuild cannot re-derive** — the database, `.env`, the whole `storage/app` tree rather than just its public uploads, Laravel Passport's signing keypair (regenerate those and every phone is signed out), the storefront's build-time `.env`, and anything else non-regenerable under `storage/` — plus a restore you have actually tested. Logs and compiled views are deliberately left out. - **Knowing that much of 6amMart's configuration lives in its database, not `.env`.** Editing the environment file for mail or payment settings changes nothing. You can do all of this on aaPanel. It is configuration you write and remember, not configuration it ships. On SixPanel it is the default state, and that is the whole of the difference. ## The measured speed difference We have now benchmarked the two, on identical hardware with the same shop's data, with aaPanel fully tuned first. **SixPanel served 6amMart's API 1.76× faster at one request and 1.82× faster with four arriving at once.** The interesting half is not the ratio, it is the cause. About 60% of it is one PHP setting — a directory restriction aaPanel places on every site, which costs a fixed 16 to 26 ms per request and disables PHP's path cache entirely. About 8% is aaPanel shipping the wrong JIT compiler mode for a Laravel application. The PHP version difference is worth exactly nothing. About 32% is unexplained, and is published as unexplained. That restriction is a real security feature, so it was worth checking whether SixPanel is simply trading safety for speed. Every cross-project read was attempted from inside a project's PHP on both machines, and every one failed on both — but the barriers differ in kind. **On the aaPanel box we benchmarked, in its default state, every site ran as the same unix user**, so the PHP-level restriction was the only thing standing there. That is the default and not a limit of the product: aaPanel's own installer creates a single `www` account and runs the stack as it, and an administrator can give a site its own pool user afterwards. On SixPanel the separate account is not optional — it is the kernel refusing a different user — and one case parts the two: a private file another site wrote into the shared temporary directory was readable on aaPanel and refused on SixPanel. The full method, every endpoint, the tuning applied to aaPanel, and the part we cannot account for are in **[SixPanel vs SixPanel Docker vs aaPanel](https://www.allsweb.com/compare/sixpanel-vs-aapanel-vs-docker)**. :::note What this ratio does not mean The tax is a fixed cost per request, so it dominates short work and vanishes on long work — on the slowest 6amMart admin report the two machines were only 1.17× apart, because there the application is the bottleneck and the panel barely matters. And it says nothing about aaPanel running anything other than 6amMart, which is most of what aaPanel is for. ::: ## One capability difference — and it is not the database version An earlier version of this page said a panel like aaPanel cannot offer MariaDB 10.11 on Ubuntu 26.04 or Debian 13. **We checked aaPanel's own installer and withdrew the claim**, because the real difference is bigger and simpler: aaPanel does not install on those releases at all. Its installer (`https://www.aapanel.com/script/install_7.0_en.sh`, read 10 September 2026) names Debian 11/12 and Ubuntu 22/24 as its supported set, rejects any non-LTS Ubuntu, and contains no reference to Ubuntu 26.04 or Debian 13 anywhere. So on the two newest releases the question of which database version it offers does not arise. SixPanel installs on exactly three: Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and Debian 13. It takes every component from the release's own archive rather than from a third-party repository — MariaDB 11.8 on Ubuntu 26.04 and Debian 13, 10.11 on Ubuntu 24.04 — so security updates arrive through the distribution. That is a smaller supported set than aaPanel's and a newer one; which of those matters is your call, not ours. The version itself is not worth choosing a panel over: [10.11 against 11.8 on identical servers measured a wash](https://www.allsweb.com/compare/database-engines). The engine is — [MySQL is not a drop-in substitute for MariaDB here](https://www.allsweb.com/compare/database-engines) — and that applies to aaPanel exactly as much as to us. (The container runtime, which pinned `mariadb:10.11` as an image and never consulted the host's packages, was retired on 29 August 2026; that wash measurement is why it cost nothing.) ## How to choose **Choose aaPanel** if the box hosts more than 6amMart, if you need mail, if you want per-site PHP versions, or if you already know it well. **Choose SixPanel** if this server exists to run one shop, and you would rather the queue worker, the scheduler, the websocket port, the uploads path and a verified backup already be correct than spend a week making them correct. ## If you stay on aaPanel Run [SixPreflight](/sixpreflight) against the server afterwards. It is free, it reads the configuration rather than changing it, and it will tell you which of the six items above are actually in place — including the ones that fail silently. That is worth doing whichever panel you pick. ## Related [SixPanel vs SixPanel Docker vs aaPanel — the full benchmark](https://www.allsweb.com/compare/sixpanel-vs-aapanel-vs-docker) · [SixPanel vs CloudPanel](https://www.allsweb.com/compare/sixpanel-vs-cloudpanel) · [SixPanel vs a plain server](https://www.allsweb.com/compare/sixpanel-vs-plain-server) · [Which operating system](https://www.allsweb.com/compare/operating-systems) · [Which database](https://www.allsweb.com/compare/database-engines)