Personally, I don't think there's a whole lot of difference between control panels. Some are prettier than others, but they all do pretty much the same things. I use cPanel mainly because I started with cPanel, and it's more convenient to stick to the same control panel, especially when running multiple servers / VPS's.
I will say, however, that cPanel's ubiquity is an advantage when changing hosts or shuffling accounts between servers. I use Linux servers, and finding a host that will provide cPanel is, well, effortless. In fact, it's hard to find a Linux hosting company that won't install cPanel, even if their default panel is something else. cPanel is everywhere in Linux hosting.
So why does this matter? Well, the truth is that we can use pretty much any control panel (or none at all) for ordinary server operations. Software installations, updates, editing DNS settings, file transfers, and so forth can all be done via SSH, which is often faster than clicking around through multiple levels of icons. (But then again, when I started using computers, there was no such thing as a GUI, anyway.)
But take a situation like the one I recently had, when my previous hosting just became altogether unreliable. Moving to another host that used the same control panel made my life a lot easier because I could package and transfer the accounts with a few clicks, rather than manually creating tarballs, SCPing them via SSH, checksumming them, creating home directories, extracting the tarballs, creating DNS entries, and so on, and so on. There are few things easier in I.T. than moving accounts from one cPanel server to another.
That's not to say that other panels don't have the same ability, because most of them do. But like I said, practically everyone in Linux hosting offers cPanel as one of the options, so using it widened my selection and made the move generally easier.
Richard
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