DirectAdmin alternative
DirectAdmin is cheap and broad. KLYRN counts nothing and verifies everything.
DirectAdmin publishes $5 a month for two accounts and twenty domains, runs on three operating-system families and six web servers, and includes mail. KLYRN runs on one operating system with one web server, never counts sites, domains or accounts on a paid edition, and reads DirectAdmin's own user backups so the move is a plan you read rather than a weekend.
Side by side
What each one counts, runs and refuses.
Every DirectAdmin cell was read on its own pricing or documentation page on 6 September 2026 and is linked below.
| KLYRN | DirectAdmin | |
|---|---|---|
| What the licence counts | Licensed servers only; nothing on a paid edition | Accounts and domains: Personal PLUS 2 and 20, Lite 10 and 50, Standard unlimited 1 |
| Entry price | Free edition, available now; paid prices announced at launch | $5 a month USD for Personal PLUS; $15 Lite; $29 Standard; only monthly prices published 1 |
| Growing past the tier | Nothing changes | Volume discounts from 15% at four Standard licences to 40% at thirty-five 1 |
| Free or trial | Free edition, no card, no account | No trial licence; a 30-day money-back guarantee and a public demo 2 |
| Operating systems | Ubuntu 24.04 LTS on x86_64 only in V1 | RHEL family 8–10, Debian 11–13, Ubuntu 22.04–26.04, on amd64 and arm64 3 |
| Web server | nginx only, chosen for you, with every tuned value showing the rule that produced it | Apache, LiteSpeed, Nginx, Nginx with Apache, Nginx Unit or OpenLiteSpeed 3 |
| Panel port | 7443, its own TLS listener | 2222 4 |
| Not hosted, by decision | Exim 4 | |
| WordPress | Built in: staging, cloning, ten health signals, an update policy that backs up first | WordPress Manager after da build wpcli; staging, cloning and update management not described in its documentation 5 |
What KLYRN spends the narrowness on
Things that verify themselves.
- The installer
- Eleven stages that check whether they already ran, apply themselves and verify their own result. 53 seconds on the first clean run of a 3-vCPU VPS.
klyrn install --planlists every stage and its state. - Backups
- An archive counts as a backup only after it has been listed back and every SHA-256 in its manifest matched. Off-site copies are encrypted before they leave the server, and the key is never discarded on rotation.
- Updates
- Signed manifest, checksum, state snapshot, switch, post-checks, and a swap back when they fail. Seven broken releases served to a real server; all seven refused.
- The server itself
klyrn doctor: twenty-two checks, failures first, working even when the panel is down.klyrn health: thirteen checks with bounded self-repair and a circuit breaker that stops and asks for a human.- Privilege
- The web tier runs as an unprivileged user and cannot become root, open the database or run a program. The root core is not on the network. The model, in full.
KLYRN reads a DirectAdmin user backup directly.
The account, its domains, subdomains and pointers, the PHP version from the selector, the databases with their users' password hashes, the crontab and the mailbox count are parsed from the archive DirectAdmin already produces. Nothing runs on the old server. Nothing is written here until you have read the plan; the result is previewed and verified before DNS moves. Move first. Change DNS when you're ready.
Where DirectAdmin wins
The reasons to stay, stated plainly.
- $5 a month you can pay today. KLYRN's paid editions are not on sale; the Free edition is what exists now.
- Mail. DirectAdmin ships Exim. KLYRN hosts no mail in V1.
- Six web servers and three OS families, including arm64. KLYRN is Ubuntu 24.04 on x86_64 with nginx, and refuses an ARM machine because no ARM machine has ever run it.
- Years in production. KLYRN is a beta: tested on real servers and not finished. What that means in practice.
Sources
Every DirectAdmin claim on this page, with the page it came from.
Read on 6 September 2026. Prices and documentation change; the date is what makes this checkable.
- directadmin.com/pricing.php: tiers, account and domain counts, the USD statement, monthly-only prices, and the volume discount schedule.
- docs.directadmin.com: licensing and directadmin.com/demo.php (the money-back guarantee, no trial licence, the public demo).
- docs.directadmin.com: supported operating systems, installation overview (architectures) and web services.
- docs.directadmin.com: general usage (port 2222) and Exim.
- docs.directadmin.com: WordPress (installation, password reset, database configuration and removal after
da build wpcli; staging, cloning and update management are not described).
DirectAdmin is a trademark of its owner; KLYRN is not affiliated with, endorsed by or a partner of it.
Still on DirectAdmin?
Hear the prices the day they are set.
Free needs no waiting: install it on a fresh server this afternoon. This list is for the paid editions, whose prices are announced with the first stable release.
One email when pricing and the first release are announced. Nothing else.