aaPanel significantly outpaces OpenPanel in community adoption with 3,026 stars compared to 713 stars on GitHub. This 4.2x difference suggests aaPanel has a much larger and more active community. In terms of developer contributions, aaPanel has 756 forks, indicating moderate developer engagement.

Both projects show recent activity, with aaPanel last updated 7 days ago and OpenPanel 10 hours ago.

Both tools share common technology foundations, being built with Bash, Python, PHP. However, they differ in their additional technology choices: aaPanel uses Perl while OpenPanel leverages JavaScript, CSS, Typescript, JSX, Next.js, Remix.

aaPanel has been in development longer, starting 7 years ago, compared to OpenPanel which began 2 years ago. This 4.7-year head start suggests aaPanel may have more mature features and established processes.

OpenPanel is licensed under MIT, while aaPanel's license terms are not publicly specified.

Both tools serve similar use cases in Control Panels.

OpenPanel provides self-hosting options for complete data control and customization, while aaPanel may be primarily cloud-based or require different deployment approaches.