History: Why ClearOS

• Tons of features
• Great integration (makes diverse tools have a consistent user experience)
• PHP
• As per Marc Laporte's suggestion, they moved to Bootstrap in v7
• Nice services from ClearCenter (remote backups, security audits, domain names, etc.)
• Strong feature set for on premise (Gateway and Networking)

Why not ISPConfig

ISPConfig was the original server admin panel component for WikiSuite (It was still called Tiki Suite back then), as you can see in slides from 2011

But ClearOS was picked.

WikiSuite is about having all the tools for one organization, and available on premises or in a data center.

• ISPconfig
  • is for hosting many projects / customers on one server
  • is focused on being in a data center (and not really tailored to an on premise installation)
• ClearOS
  • is designed to have multiple tools for one domain, so not multi-domain (well, you can have a some mirror domains, but it's not multi-tenant)
  • is originally designed for hosting on premises, and has evolved to the cloud
  • is offered pre-installed on hardware: ClearBOX and HPE.

For an eventual offering of WikiSuite as SaaS, we will need a platform to manage multiple virtual machines, not a platform to manage shared hosting applications. See: Orchestrator.

We have been working with the ClearOS community to improve it as a hosting platform, and get some of the benefits of ISPconfig.

When is ISPConfig better? If you are a provider of shared hosting

Why not Webmin

• https://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos-devel/2014-January/009460.html

Why not SME

Why not Zentyal

• Zentyal is more in Perl (while we preferred ClearOS's PHP)

On the good side, Zentyal is based on Ubuntu which has a nice and predictable release schedule.

Long after we started working with ClearOS, Zentyal chose to remove lots of functionality, including the web server.

In contrast, the WikiSuite project has lead to multiple enhancements to ClearOS as a web server (ex: Let's Encrypt, PHP version selection, better configs, better handling of multiple sites, etc.)

Why not NethServer