A quick analysis on the various hosting industry software, or any software for that matter will show you without any trace of doubt, that user-friendliness is one of the most crucial factors for the life and death of software.

For instance, all the control panels are the products of man’s quest to make things simpler. They wanted to make the interactions simpler. So came the auto-installers. Today, I’m here to do a little bit of comparison of the auto-installers available in the market for Control Panels.

The concept of auto-installers were introduced by Fantastico. It was a wonderful idea, of giving the power to the normal users to install and use various user applications like blogs, cms, forums, image galleries, wikis, calenders, etc.

It had a pretty decent appearance and was able to capture quite a big slab of the market. The users were happy, as they didn’t have to go for the technical support team for the installation of every other trivial software. But then, there was always this complaint. The updates from Fantastico was not as fast as people would like it to be. Again, Fantastico divided the installation into 3 steps, which was acceptable, but avoidable and bugging.

What I would love to show you guys is another cool product. Its called Softaculous. This is nothing new. Softaculous has been in the market since mid 2009.

And this is one product that has evolved a lot. I mean it, a lot. Softaculous came with a very quiet entry, and the product was pretty small. The interface was not much applaud-able, and like any new product, they had trivial bugs.

But if you analyze the journey, from then till now, the growth of the product has been absolutely amazing. Today, softaculous is a synonym of faster updates and user-friendliness.

Softaculous gives one click-one step installation to 140 scripts. Unlike other auto installers Softaculous is much faster, again I mean it when I say faster.

They started off as free, and when the market demand shot up, they decided that it is time to give premium product as well as a free product. The free product gives out 60 scripts, and the premium product gives 140 scripts, and allows the option to add more scripts.

It is not only just the number of scripts available; but also how fast the update will be available once the product is available in market!

Softaculous gives along a handy software center through which we can manage the whole product easily. I guess the Import option is particularly handy, as it helps you to import the software already installed using some other auto-installer into Softaculous, and take up the rest from there.

It is to be noted that Softaculous, Fantastico, and various other auto-installers like Installatron can co-exist within a server without conflicting each other.

I’ve got to tell about the cost of the product to make it very very clear, why you should go for it. When Fantastico costs $90 per year, Softaculous costs just $24 per year. What more can one wish for? Softaculous is and will be a MUST-HAVE-ADDITION in your server.