If you've been in the self-hosted game server world lately, you've probably heard about Pelican Panel — the community fork of Pterodactyl that's been gaining serious traction in 2025–2026. So which one should you actually use?
Short answer: it depends on what you're building. Here's the full breakdown.
Pterodactyl Panel's original development slowed significantly after 2022. The core team became less active, leaving the community with an increasingly outdated codebase that didn't support modern PHP/Laravel versions.
In response, a group of community contributors forked the project and created Pelican Panel — a modernized, actively maintained rewrite that drops the old Wings daemon in favor of a new Rust-based backend called Pyrodactyl.
✓ Huge ecosystem — thousands of eggs
✓ Massive community, tons of tutorials
✓ Battle-tested, very stable
✓ Works with most hosting control panels
✗ Development has slowed
✗ Older Laravel/PHP stack
✗ UI feels dated compared to Pelican
✓ Actively developed in 2025–2026
✓ Modern UI, much cleaner interface
✓ New Rust daemon (Pyrodactyl) — faster
✓ Modern Laravel, better long-term future
✗ Smaller egg ecosystem (growing fast)
✗ Fewer tutorials and community guides
✗ Still in active development, occasional bugs
| Feature | Pterodactyl | Pelican |
|---|---|---|
| Active development | ✗ Slow | ✓ Active |
| Egg ecosystem | ✓ Huge (500+) | Growing (~100+) |
| Modern UI | ✗ Dated | ✓ Clean & fast |
| Docker Compose install | ✓ | ✓ |
| Wings/daemon support | Wings (Go) | Pyrodactyl (Rust) |
| API | ✓ v1 API | ✓ v1 API (compatible) |
| Multi-node support | ✓ | ✓ |
| Community tutorials | ✓ Tons | Growing |
| Long-term future | Uncertain | ✓ Better outlook |
For new setups: go with Pelican. The development momentum is clearly there, the UI is significantly better, and the egg compatibility is catching up fast.
For existing Pterodactyl setups: no need to migrate right now. Pterodactyl still works perfectly fine and the egg ecosystem is unmatched. Revisit migration in late 2026.
Pelican's installation is similar to Pterodactyl. The official docs are at pelican.dev. A Docker Compose quick-start:
Pelican Panel guide coming soon — subscribe to updates or check back.