PufferPanel

Last reviewed Sep 13, 2026 · 786 words

Pterodactyl's install guide wants a MySQL server, Redis, a PHP stack, a separate Wings daemon and a signed certificate before you host a single Minecraft world. PufferPanel wants one Go binary, one port and SQLite. That is the pitch in full: it is the game server panel for someone running three or four servers for friends who does not want to operate a small web company to do it. At 1,744 stars it is a fraction of Pterodactyl's size, and the trade is what you would expect.

One binary, one port, no database server

Panel and daemon ship in the same process. The web interface listens on 8080, the built-in SFTP server on 5657, and game servers get whatever ports you map. Config lives in /etc/pufferpanel, server files in /var/lib/pufferpanel, and the default database is a SQLite file, which is fine up to dozens of servers. The compose file is short enough to remember:

services:
  pufferpanel:
    image: pufferpanel/pufferpanel:latest
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
      - "5657:5657"
      - "25565:25565"
    volumes:
      - ./config:/etc/pufferpanel
      - ./servers:/var/lib/pufferpanel
    restart: unless-stopped

There is no signup page. You create the first admin from the shell with pufferpanel user add (prefix it with docker exec for the container), which is the right default for a panel that hands out shell-adjacent power. OAuth2 clients are built in, so a Discord bot or a script can start and stop servers without a human's password.

Templates cover more games than you'd expect, and that's the catch

Every server is created from a template: a JSON description of how to install, start, stop and detect readiness for a given game. The community template repository covers Minecraft in its many flavours, most Source engine games via SteamCMD, Terraria, Valheim, Factorio and a long tail of others. Importing them takes one click.

The honest part is that "supported" means "someone wrote a template once". Minecraft templates are exercised daily and just work. Steam games depend on whichever launch flags were true when the template was written, and a game update that changes a config path leaves you editing JSON. Budget an hour of tuning for anything outside the top ten games, and read the template before trusting it, since it runs arbitrary shell as the panel user during install.

Docker mode isolates each server without a second panel

PufferPanel can run each game server as its own container instead of a bare process. You mount the Docker socket into the panel container and pick the Docker environment when creating a server, and the game gets its own image, its own filesystem view and a memory limit. That is the same isolation Pterodactyl gives you through Wings, without the second daemon. The cost is that the panel container now holds the Docker socket, which is root on the host in all but name, so this is not a panel to expose to people you don't trust.

Multi-node is possible too. A second machine runs the same binary in daemon-only mode and registers with the panel, so you can put the memory-hungry modded Minecraft box on the bigger server and keep the panel on the small one.

Where Pterodactyl and Pelican are the safer bet

Three situations. If you are selling hosting, or running more than a couple of dozen servers for people who will file tickets, Pterodactyl has the egg ecosystem, the billing integrations and the years of hardening that a hobby panel does not. If you like Pterodactyl's model but not its PHP dependency pile, Pelican is the fork to watch. And if everything you host is Minecraft, Crafty Controller understands Minecraft specifically, with scheduled backups, a server installer and Bedrock support, which a general panel only approximates.

PufferPanel wins in the middle: a household or a Discord community with a handful of servers across two or three games, run by one person who wants updates to be docker compose pull. It has been around since 2015 and the Apache-2.0 licence means nobody is going to relicense it out from under you.

What I'd do

For a friends-and-family box, PufferPanel with Docker mode on, the panel behind a reverse proxy with TLS, and the SFTP port firewalled to your own IP. Import only the templates you use, keep the servers directory on a disk with room for backups, and snapshot that directory nightly because the panel does not do backups for you. If the day comes when someone is paying you, migrate to Pterodactyl and consider PufferPanel the thing that taught you what you needed.