The Plesk hosting control panels facilitate the work of developers, sysadmins and other web professionals. The new version Plesk Obsidian promises an array of new and useful functions and an improved user interface. Working with Plesk users, the user interface was modernized and UX problems were resolved. 

The successor to Plesk Onyx resolves problems arising during website setup and enables the subsequent administration of multiple clients via a shared panel. The improvements predominantly address issues in areas on the administration side.

Here at Ibmi Media, as part of our Server Management Services, we regularly help our Customers to fix Plesk related issues.

What is Plesk Obsidian?

New Plesk is following the naming style set by the previous release. Therefore, the name of the new version is after the volcanic glass, obsidian.

When comparing the old with the new version, the former is denser and heavier. As a result, the newest version has strongly focused on making Plesk more lightweight and faster out of the box. Hence, the name perfectly suits.

Comparison: Plesk Onyx vs Obsidian

Let us compare the features of both the Plesk version one by one. Comparison of Plesk Onyx vs Obsidian will give you a clear idea of new features.

1. User interfaces

The new colors and font sizes brought it up to date with modern design trends in Obsidian. As a result, it improves the user experience.

The menu on the left of the screen is now collapsible to show more screen space. Moreover, the new global search option makes it easier to find specific functions.

To sum up, the interface is more lightweight now and easier to view than the old Plesk Onyx.

2. SSL: Plesk Onyx vs Obsidian

The Let’s Encrypt option is no more in Obsidian under Website & Domains. So it’s a bit difficult for the old users to figure out installing free SSL. However, SSL It extension comes with all new installation as well as upgrades. It is now supporting more CAs like Symantec, GeoTrust, and RapidSSL paid SSL along with Let’s Encrypt.

The option is now available under SSL/TLS certificate and also available in Extensions.

Another feature introduced in Plesk Obsidian is SNI for mail services.  With this option, we can secure mail for a domain with an individual SSL/TLS certificate. MailEnable 10.20 and Postfix 3.4 support SNI for mail currently.

3. Repair Kit: Plesk Onyx vs Obsidian

Plesk Repair Kit a very useful and powerful self-repair tool. Now in the new version, in addition to old features, we can list, filter and kill the processes.

Moreover, we can also see the total RAM, CPU, and Disk usage.

4. Advanced Monitoring

The old health monitoring tool of Plesk Onyx in no more in the latest version. Instead, Obsidian is providing new Grafana charts. To enable the feaure we need to manually install the extension in Plesk Obsidian.

The new version is also providing Realtime notification in a cool interface as below image.

5. Security and Flexibility

The new version is More secure, More robust, More useful and Faster out of the box as claimed by Plesk. Crashed services now restart automatically. The bugs related to PHP-FPM are no more. Graceful restart now minimized website downtime. NGINX is precompiled with the PageSpeed module.

6. Better performance

All functions are more "out-of-the-box", making them more readily accessible and easy to use, including the new extensions Advanced Monitoring & Grafana. The new Restricted Mode can be used to control which server-side operations the allocated Plesk administrators can carry out.

Admins, resellers and users can easily move domains between subscriptions.

In order to avoid long waiting times for users and facilitate a smooth surfing experience, the PageSpeed module was integrated into NGINX Webserver.

Worth the upgrade

In comparison to Onyx, Plesk Obsidian boasts a good number of updates and quality-of-life improvements. Therefore, it worth upgrading to Obsidian. Obsidian is out now and hence it can be upgraded via the Plesk interface. We can upgrade it from Plesk Onyx to Plesk Obsidian from updates and upgrades and via CLI.

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