About
Five years of building,
then a release
Unicorn Panel went into development in 2021 and shipped in 2026. That gap is the whole story: a hosting panel is the software everything else on a server depends on, and there is no good version of getting it mostly right.
Why it exists
The panel we wanted to run
Every panel on the market was built for one server and then stretched. Add a second machine and you are back to juggling logins, copying settings by hand, and keeping a mental map of which customer lives where. The features that should be standard, per-site isolation, a real API, restoring a single file, arrive as paid add-ons or not at all.
So the brief was narrow and it has not changed since 2021: treat the fleet as the unit, not the box. Give every site its own container because that is the only honest way to host other people’s code. Put the whole API in the base product, because an API behind a paywall is not an API. Then build the pieces that nobody else would, rather than wrapping the same four daemons everyone else wraps.
How it is built
A first-party stack, on purpose
Most panels are a web interface over other people’s software. Four of the pieces here are ours, which is why they behave like one product rather than a collection of daemons with a shared login.
Sleipnir
Our own web server, built to sit behind the panel’s proxy. NGINX, Apache and OpenLiteSpeed remain fully supported for anyone who prefers them.
Hermes
One privilege-separated mail server in place of an MTA, an IMAP server, a spam filter and an antivirus daemon.
Mimir
A lighter SQL server for the sites that do not need a full MariaDB, with MariaDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL alongside it when they do.
Heimdall
Authoritative DNS with multi-host replication, built into the panel instead of bolted onto it.
Still being built
The changelog is the proof
Longevity is easy to claim and hard to check. The honest version is a public changelog with dates on it, so you can see for yourself whether the software is still moving. As it stands, the 159 most recent releases shipped across 253 days.
Every release lands on the same page, tagged by what changed: new, enhanced, fixed, security, polish. Nothing is held back for a quarterly announcement.
See every releaseIndependent
Not part of anyone else’s portfolio
Two of the best-known panels on the market, cPanel and Plesk, are owned by the same parent company. When the alternative to a product is sold by the company that sells the product, the pricing and the roadmap answer to the same people.
Unicorn Panel is built and published by Unicorn Labs LLC, a US company with no parent group, no investors steering the roadmap, and no other panel in the portfolio to protect.
If we stop
What happens to your servers
The question every self-hosted buyer should ask, and the one nobody answers. Here is ours.
- It runs on your hardware. There is no hosted service to switch off and nothing phones home for permission to work. Your sites keep serving whatever happens here.
- Two servers and two accounts stay free, permanently. Not a trial. If you never pay us, nothing expires.
- A lapsed license does not take the panel down. Stop paying and everything keeps running exactly as it is, with nothing deleted. Thirty days later you drop back to the free tier: updates stop, and you cannot add servers or accounts beyond the free two of each. Everything already there stays.
- Your data was never ours. No usage telemetry is collected, so there is no copy of your fleet anywhere to lose or hand over.
What we will not do
Commitments, not aspirations
No telemetry
The panel reports nothing about your servers, your sites or your customers. The privacy policy says the same thing in longer form.
No paywalled API
Every endpoint is in the base product. Automation is not an upsell, and per-account keys carry exactly the access that account already has.
No isolation upsell
A container per site is how every site is built, including on the free tier. It is not an add-on with its own line item.
No surprise repricing
Today’s rate is grandfathered for as long as you keep the license, and there is a 30-day money-back guarantee on the first invoice.
The company
Where to find us
Unicorn Panel is published by Unicorn Labs LLC, 4925 S Broadway Ave, Unit #6070, Wichita, KS 67216, United States.
Support runs Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 19:00, and the community forum is open to everyone, licensed or not. Security reports have their own policy and a PGP key.
Run it before you believe any of this.
Two servers and two accounts are free for as long as you want them, and the live demo needs no signup at all.