Pelican or Pterodactyl? Game server panels compared

The short answer

Pick Pelican for a new server: its panel used less memory without MariaDB and Redis, offered 329 game templates during setup against Pterodactyl's 14, and has roles, passkeys and plugins. Pick Pterodactyl if you want a stable 1.x release that changes slowly and keeps working as documented, or if you run it already and would rather wait for Pelican 1.0 before you move.

What we tested

We installed both on the same fresh Melonslab VC-P Alloy (2 vCPU, 8 GB) with Debian 13, one after the other, by following our guides Pterodactyl and Pelican step by step, each with nginx and Certbot. Each panel had its Wings on the same server. We removed the first completely, Docker included, before we installed the second.

In each, we created the same game server: a Minecraft server from the Paper egg, with 2 GB of memory and room for two backups, on port 25565 for IPv4 and IPv6. Then we:

• pinged it from outside with a Minecraft status request;
• edited server.properties in the panel's file manager and restarted the server;
• joined it with a headless Minecraft client, which chatted, and sent say from the panel's console, which the client received;
• deleted the world in the file manager, and brought it back from a backup;
• rebooted the server, measured the memory a few minutes later, and ran each guide's update steps.

Our client speaks Minecraft 1.21.11, so both servers ran Paper 1.21.11 instead of the latest version. In Pterodactyl, we changed the version on the Startup tab and reinstalled the server; in Pelican, we set it when we created it.

The numbers

Memory is what systemd and docker stats reported for each part, a few minutes after a reboot, with the game server running and nobody on it. The Minecraft server is the same software in both, so its difference is noise. Our Pterodactyl backup was 409 MB and Pelican's 241 MB, because Pterodactyl's game server still had the files of the first Minecraft version it installed.

Setup

Both install the same way: PHP from Debian, a web server, a certificate from Let's Encrypt, Docker from Docker's own script, and Wings as a systemd service running as root. Wings drives the root Docker daemon, so neither runs with rootless Podman, and each needs a server of its own. Following each guide took us 10 to 15 minutes, most of it in the browser, and each Paper server installed in under 30 seconds.

The difference is where you make the admin. Pterodactyl does it on the command line, with php artisan p:user:make, so the panel is never open to strangers. Pelican has a web installer, and until you finish it, whoever opens it first can create the admin account; its guide lets only your own address through nginx until then, which worked as written. Pelican also needs no MariaDB and Redis, so it has two services fewer to install and keep up to date.

Each had a surprise:

• Pterodactyl turns on Google's reCAPTCHA by default, with keys that ship with every copy. Our automated browser got an image puzzle and could not log in, and every visitor's browser loads the script from Google. Its guide switches it off in step 6.
• Pelican's Paper egg now has a required User Agent field, empty by default, for the download service of PaperMC, Paper's makers. The form does not go on until you fill it in, with a name and a contact address such as my-panel (you@example.com). Our Pelican guide was written before this field existed.

Day-to-day use

The game server's own pages hold the same things in both: a console, files, databases, schedules, users, backups, network, startup settings and an activity log. Both consoles showed the server's output live and ran the commands we typed; in Pterodactyl, we also saw a say reach the client within a second. Both file managers edited server.properties in the browser, and deleting the world took two clicks.

Pterodactyl has two looks. Its game server pages are a modern, dark React app. Its admin area is an older design, where you create a node, allocations and a server in separate forms, and type the address for an allocation yourself.

Pelican is one Filament app, light or dark, for both. Creating a server is a three-step wizard, and the allocation form lists the server's own addresses to pick from. Its admin area adds Roles, so you can give someone part of the admin rights, Webhooks, a Health page and Plugins. Each account can add passkeys and SSH keys as well as two-factor authentication. Profile has a Language setting with Swedish, but only a small part of the panel is translated.

Eggs and plugins

Eggs are the templates that install and start each game. Pterodactyl comes with 14 in four nests: Minecraft, Source Engine, Rust and voice servers. Pelican's installer offered 329, in ten groups such as Minecraft, SteamCMD games, voice, databases and chat bots, and installed the ones we picked.

The community eggs are the same ones. The large community collection that Pterodactyl users relied on moved in 2024 to the pelican-eggs organisation on GitHub, which publishes eggs such as Paper in two files: one for Pelican and one that Pterodactyl can import. So Pterodactyl can run most of the same games; you import each egg by hand.

Pelican has a plugin system for themes, language packs and new features, installed from the Plugins page. Pelican says it is still in development. Pterodactyl has no plugin system. Changes to it, such as themes, mean editing the panel's files, and they are lost or break when you update, which is also why they do not carry over to Pelican.

Resources

The panel itself is where they differ. Pterodactyl's MariaDB alone used 160 MB, and Redis another 10. Pelican keeps its data in a SQLite file in the panel's directory, and used about 95 MB less in total. Pelican's queue worker used more, 125 MB against 70.

Wings, Docker and the game server cost the same in both, and they are most of the bill: with one idle Minecraft server, the whole server used 1.8 GB with Pterodactyl and 1.6 GB with Pelican. Each game server needs its own memory on top, about 1 GB for an empty Paper server, so the size of the server depends on the games, not the panel.

Updates and backups

Both keep game server backups as .tar.gz files on the same server, and both can send them to an S3 bucket instead, which we did not test. Both restored a deleted world in about two seconds, with the option to delete all files first.

Pterodactyl updates with the commands in its guide, which took 22 seconds and worked as written. Pterodactyl released 1.12.0 in January 2026 and 1.15.1 in August, ten releases in eight months, with Wings alongside.

Pelican changed under our guide. Since the guide was tested in September, Pelican went from beta 38 to 1.0.0-rc.1, the first release candidate. Its update script moved to a new address, https://pelican.dev/update-panel.sh, and the old one now answers 404. The new script needs rsync, which Debian 13 does not have until you run apt install -y rsync. With it, the script checked the requirements, backed up .env and the database to a dated folder, and updated the panel in 40 seconds. wings update updates Wings by itself. Pelican shipped nine releases in 2026, about one a month.

In one of two reboots, Pterodactyl's game server stayed stopped; we had started it less than a minute before, and Wings' state file still said it was stopped. Pelican's game server came back by itself.

Moving from Pterodactyl to Pelican

Pelican documents a migration, Migrating from Pterodactyl. It upgrades the Pterodactyl database in place: users, servers, nodes, eggs, backups, schedules, subusers and API keys carry over, and game servers keep running with their files. It needs Pterodactyl 1.11.4 or newer and PHP 8.4. One script installs Pelican in /var/www/pelican next to the old panel, and another, run on every node, swaps Wings and keeps its configuration. Nests and locations become tags, and themes and other changes to Pterodactyl's files do not come along.

We did not test the migration. It cannot be undone, so back up the database, /var/www/pterodactyl and /etc/pterodactyl first, as Pelican says.

Licence and cost

We checked the projects' own pages and GitHub on 14 October 2026.

• Pterodactyl is open source under the MIT licence, both the panel and Wings. It was started by Dane Everitt. On the panel's main branch, 14 people made 38 commits in the six months before our test, most of them by one maintainer.
• Pelican is a fork of Pterodactyl started in 2024. Its panel is open source under the AGPL 3.0, which means that if you change it and let others use it over the network, you must share your changes. Its Wings is under the MIT licence. In the same six months, 33 contributors, two of them bots, made 203 commits to the panel.

Both are free, with no paid editions, and support comes from their Discord servers and GitHub. Pelican's dashboard has a donation link; Pterodactyl's sends anonymous usage data once a day unless you answer no during setup.

Which one to pick

Pelican suits a new game server: a lighter panel without MariaDB and Redis, hundreds of eggs to pick from, roles, passkeys and plugins, and a team shipping a release about once a month. Its weak points are that it is not at 1.0 yet, that things moved under our guide within weeks (the update script, a new required egg field), the web installer you have to lock down until it is done, and the AGPL if you plan to change it. Follow the Pelican guide, and read the release notes before each update.

Pterodactyl suits you if you want a panel that stays the way it is documented, or already run one. Its weak points are the reCAPTCHA from Google that is on until you switch it off, MariaDB and Redis to look after, only 14 eggs out of the box, no plugin system, and slower development. Follow the Pterodactyl guide, or plan the migration above once Pelican reaches 1.0.

Either one ran a small Minecraft server comfortably on a VC-P Alloy, with 6 GB of memory left for more game servers.