Pelican Panel is a free open-source game server control panel and Pterodactyl successor. See features, Docker isolation, security and top alternatives.
Pelican Panel is a free, open-source control panel for managing game servers. It gives hosting operators and gaming communities a browser-based dashboard for creating, configuring, starting, stopping and monitoring servers, while the underlying game processes run in isolated Docker containers managed by a companion agent called Wings.
The project began in mid-2024 as a fork of Pterodactyl, one of the most widely used open-source game panels, after community maintainers grew concerned about a long gap in Pterodactyl's Wings releases. Pelican was built to keep the familiar workflow and much of the existing ecosystem (including server templates known as eggs) while shipping updates and security fixes faster.
Every server managed by Pelican runs in its own Docker container, which isolates dependencies, enforces resource limits, and prevents one server from affecting another on the same host. The panel supports a wide range of games out of the box, including Minecraft, Terraria, Palworld, Valheim, Enshrouded and Factorio, with more added through community-maintained eggs.
Security features include native SSL support, two-factor authentication and AES-256 encryption, and the interface offers one-click installations, real-time resource monitoring and role-based access for teams managing multiple servers or customers.
Pelican Panel is 100% free and open source under the AGPLv3 license, with no paid tiers, license fees or usage limits imposed by the project itself.
The only costs users incur are for the server hardware or VPS they choose to run it on, which is the same model used by comparable panels like Pterodactyl and Crafty Controller.
Pelican Panel is a free, open-source web-based control panel for deploying, configuring and monitoring game servers, with each server running in an isolated Docker container.
Yes. Pelican Panel is entirely free and open source under the AGPLv3 license; users only pay for their own server hardware or hosting.
Pelican is a community fork of Pterodactyl, created in mid-2024 after Pterodactyl's Wings component went an extended period without updates, aiming to ship faster releases and security fixes.
Pelican supports Minecraft, Valheim, Palworld, Terraria, Enshrouded, Factorio and many other games through community-built server templates called eggs.
Yes, Pelican relies on Docker containers, managed through its Wings agent, to isolate and run each game server instance.
Pelican maintains compatibility with much of the Pterodactyl ecosystem, including many eggs, and the community provides migration documentation for existing Pterodactyl installations.
Pelican Panel is maintained by a volunteer open-source community through the pelican-dev GitHub organization, with no single company behind it.
Pelican Panel is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPLv3), which requires that modifications used to provide a network service also be made available under the same license.