Best Free and Open Source Software

posted by Rianne Schestowitz on Jan 10, 2025

• 11 Best Free and Open Source Web Hosting Control Panels - LinuxLinks

  Two of the most popular control panels are Plesk and cPanel. These are web-based graphical control panels that allow you to easily and intuitively administer websites, DNS, e-mail accounts, SSL certificates and databases. However, they are both proprietary software. Hosting providers will charge a monthly fee for these control panels to be installed on a server. Fortunately, there is a wide range of open source software available to download at no cost that offers a real alternative to these proprietary solutions.

  To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 11 high quality web hosting control panels tools that let users take full control of a web hosting account. The ratings chart below captures our recommendations.

• ECT - fast and effective C++ file optimizer - LinuxLinks

  Efficient Compression Tool (or ECT) is a C++ file optimizer.

  It supports PNG, JPEG, GZIP and ZIP files.

  This is free and open source software.

• Alternatives to popular CLI tools: curl - LinuxLinks

  The software featured here is free and open source. All tools provide a command-line interface (CLI) unless otherwise stated.

• Topgrade - system specific update tool - LinuxLinks

  Keeping your system up to date usually involves invoking multiple package managers. This results in big, non-portable shell one-liners saved in your shell. To remedy this, Topgrade detects which tools you use and runs the appropriate commands to update them.

  This is free and open source software.

• Sentora - web hosting control panel - LinuxLinks

  Sentora is a complete open-source web hosting control panel built specifically to work on a variety of Linux distributions.

  Sentora is designed to be installed on a minimal OS with no webserver packages pre-installed.

  This is free and open source software.

• vim-fern - asynchronous tree viewer - LinuxLinks

  vim-fern is a general purpose asynchronous tree viewer.

  This is free and open source software.