As the year comes to a close, it's time to reflect on the past and plan ahead.
Over the last two years, I've spent 100+ hours per week working on this project. It's been a journey full of ups and downs: learning new things, making mistakes, repeating them, and gradually improving while covering new ground. For most of that time, I've been doing what I love: experimenting, building, and expanding the project. But there have also been parts that were less enjoyable: the marketing and business side of things.
I'm happy to have delivered on the promised features for version 1.0 - and even gone beyond them:
Major changes in 2025 for OpenPanel
- February 2025: Custom docroot for domains, redesigned user panel, Caddy webserver, CorazaWAF
- March: Docker containers per service, redesigned user panel, resource usage per user, dark mode
- April: Varnish and OpenResty support, Chinese and Portuguese translations, Ofelia job scheduler, remote MySQL per user, ProcessManager, FossBilling module
- May: ARM (AArch64) support, Web Terminal, per-user feature sets
- June: PostgreSQL support, File Manager improvements, SSL settings, Drag & Drop SiteBuilder
- July: Improvements to cPanel import module, OpenPanel-to-OpenPanel migrations, support for 3rd-party plugins, Email address importer
- August: OpenLiteSpeed support, Trash folder, ImunifyAV support, improvements to Applications
- September: Debian 13 support, enhancements to Resellers feature, Sentinel Firewall replaces CSF
- October: Hooks for custom scripts, Services module, Docker Compose update, Custom PhpMyAdmin domains
- November: Spanish translation, improvements to user activity log, WPCLI update, RCE vulnerability patched in WPManager
- December: PHP 8.5 support, pre-included ionCube loader
OpenPanel in 2025: By the Numbers
What's next?
No major new features planned for now: OpenPanel already offers more functionality than many decade-old alternative control panels. The focus in 2026 will be on polishing existing features, minimizing bugs, and improving the overall user experience.
A huge thanks ❤️ to everyone who contributed: through bug reports, testing, translations, or feedback. And thank you to all our users for supporting OpenPanel. Let's keep pushing forward and make the next year even better!
Stefan, co-founder of OpenPanel