CPanel
From Site5Wiki
cPanel ("Control Panel") is a graphical web-based control panel, designed to make administration of websites easy. cPanel handles all aspects of website administration in its interface. The software, which is proprietary and distributed by cPanel Inc., is designed for use by commercial web hosting services, so the company does not offer a reduced-cost personal use license; however, owners of non-profit organisations such as educational institutions and charities can request a license at no charge. Reduced prices are frequently available from dedicated-server companies, who install it along with the operating system.
cPanel runs on a number of popular RPM-based Linux distributions, such as SUSE, Fedora Core, Mandriva, 
CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and cAos, as well as FreeBSD. Preliminary support for Debian is claimed, although this version has been in "beta" state for several years, and is not supported. cPanel is commonly accessed on TCP and UDP ports 2082 and 2083 (for an SSL version). Authentication is either via HTTP or web page login.
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Features
To the client, cPanel provides front-ends for a number of common operations, including the management of PGP keys, crontab tasks, mail and FTP accounts, and mailing lists.
Several add-ons exist, the most notable being Fantastico, a bundle of scripts which automate the installation of, but not the update of certain scripts, open source web applications such as phpBB, Drupal, Joomla, TikiWiki, Moodle and over 50 others.
Unlike some other web hosting control panels, cPanel manages some software packages separately from the underlying operating system, applying upgrades to Apache, PHP, MySQL, and related software packages automatically. This ensures that these packages are kept up-to-date and compatible with cPanel, but has become a cause for consternation to some, as it becomes difficult to easily install newer versions of these packages.
WHM (Web Host Manager)
WebHost Manager (WHM) is a web-based tool used by server administrators and resellers to manage hosting accounts on a web server. WHM listens on TCP and UDP ports 2086 and 2087 by default.
As well as being accessible by the root admin, WHM is also accessible to users with reseller privileges. Reseller users of cPanel have a smaller set of features than the root user, generally limited by the server administrator, to features which they determine will affect their customers' accounts rather than the server as a whole. From WHM, the server administrator can perform maintenance operations, such as compiling Apache and upgrading RPM's installed on the system
Versions
Current version of CPanel installed; current version of WHM installed
At any one time, four versions of cPanel are available:
EDGE
EDGE is the "bleeding edge" version of cPanel. It contains all the newest features, but has not undergone much testing. EDGE is not normally used on production servers, although some people use it on development/testing systems.
CURRENT
CURRENT builds are like EDGE versions, except they've undergone testing in a production environment.
RELEASE
RELEASE builds are the preferred builds to run. While they are quite stable, they don't contain the latest features. On a default installation of cPanel, the RELEASE build will be installed.
STABLE
STABLE builds are very stable, but don't contain the latest features or bug fixes. This build is normally not used, as it is usually too old to be useful.
The specific version numbers for the latest builds of cPanel can be found at http://layer1.cpanel.net/. Their change log can also be found on that page. It is important to note that changes propagate through their builds from EDGE to CURRENT to RELEASE to STABLE. New features can be found by looking at the EDGE changes which will later be pushed to the rest of the builds.
Site5
Site5 uses a highly-customized version of cPanel called "SiteAdmin." See Site5's feature page or the Wiki page for more information about SiteAdmin
Related wiki links: ClientExec
