SixPanel vs aaPanel
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, with per-site PHP versions, and gives each one its own user and directory. 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/publicdirectly — the usualstorage:linkstep does not apply and can break image serving. - Backups that hold the right three things — database,
.env, and the uploads tree — and a restore you have actually tested.
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 aaPanel every site runs as the same unix user, so the PHP-level restriction is the only thing standing there. On SixPanel it is the kernel refusing a different user, and one case parts them: 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.
What this ratio does not mean
The tax is a fixed cost per request, so it dominates short work and vanishes on long work — the same slow 6amMart admin report is only 1.17× apart between the two. And it says nothing about aaPanel running anything other than 6amMart, which is most of what aaPanel is for.
One capability difference
There is a concrete thing a panel that installs the database from MariaDB's own repository cannot offer on the newest systems: MariaDB 10.11 on Ubuntu 26.04 or Debian 13. That setup script refuses those releases, and aaPanel installs the database natively onto the host.
A native SixPanel install is not in the same position, though it used to be. It takes every component from the release's own archive rather than from MariaDB's script — 11.8 on Ubuntu 26.04 and Debian 13, 10.11 on Ubuntu 24.04 — so it installs on all three supported releases. SixPanel Docker remains the route to 10.11 specifically on a release whose archive does not carry it, because its database is a container image (mariadb:10.11) and never consults the host's packages.
This page previously said that made a native install recommend Ubuntu 24.04, because 10.11 was the version this codebase is tested against. Both halves have moved: the version is taken from the archive now, and 10.11 against 11.8 on identical servers measured a wash. The engine still matters — MySQL is not a drop-in substitute for MariaDB here — and that applies to aaPanel exactly as much as to us.
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 against the server afterwards. It is free, it reads the configuration rather than changing it, and it will tell you which of the five 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 · SixPanel vs CloudPanel · SixPanel vs a plain server · Which operating system · Which database