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I’m currently using FOSSBilling - feel free to ask & share your experience
Because of a limited budget and the complexity of cPanel + WHMCS, I decided to go with an open-source stack: HestiaCP + FOSSBilling.
For those who don’t know, FOSSBilling is the community-driven successor of BoxBilling. It’s still considered beta, but actively maintained.
Here’s my experience so far:
Pros
- Easy to install and set up, pretty much “hands-on and ready.”
- UI is very simple… maybe a bit too simple.
- Most features are self-explanatory without needing docs (unlike WHMCS).
- Covers all the basics to run a hosting business (as long as your control panel is supported).
- Can also be used for selling non-hosting products, for example, I use it to sell WordPress plugin API keys, and it works well.
Cons
- Fewer features compared to WHMCS.
- Limited number of payment gateways.
- Sparse documentation for customization & development.
- Emails are sent via cron jobs, not in real time.
- No major issues, but a handful of small bugs here and there.
- Release cycle is slow, and the project is still marked as beta on GitHub.
What I’ve done with it so far
- Customized templates for the client dashboard.
- Developed a custom extension to enforce purchase limits for certain products.
- Submitted several issues and fixes to the official GitHub repo.
Overall, I’m satisfied with it for my needs, but I’d love to hear from others.
Let me know what you want to know, and feel free to share your own experience with FOSSBilling.
Disclaimer: I’m not an official developer, just a user sharing my experience.
Comments
You seem too new to hosting industry.
So what do you want to express? Too young, too simple? 😏
It’s an awesome project with an amazing team behind it, but from my experience it shouldn’t be used in production, and the team also says so. That being said, it has come a long way since I last played around with it.
At first I was also worried about putting it into production. But from what I’ve seen, one of the core contributors actually uses it to run her own hosting business. That gave me a bit more confidence to give it a shot.
Use search button, there is plenty of threads talking about this Panels.
I like the project and plan to use it for paid licensing purposes (not sure when, though). It's ready for production use, but yeah, on an industry scale, especially in the hosting business, it's going to hold us back a lot without doing any code customization to extend the project, since there's not much integration and automation.
That said, now there's Paymenter. I think Paymenter was a compelling alternative to WHMCS.
IMO, we need more FOSS alternatives to cPanel rather than WHMCS
HestiaCP is good, but that's it. It cannot be compared to cPanel and DirectAdmin.
If this topic isn’t in your interests, feel free to just skip it 🙂.
Paymenter looks attractive enough.
i like its design. very minimalist.
Mee too
Why don't you use fossbilling anymore?
Hestiacp cannot be resource limited (RAM, CPU) so it is not suitable for Shared Hosting.