XyraPanel is an open-source game management panel in the same space as Pterodactyl.
Instead of following the Laravel setup used by Pterodactyl, XyraPanel is built with Nuxt.
The short version: the game panel ecosystem stalled, Pterodactyl hit a slow decline that nobody really wanted to admit.
Here’s the longer version, with context.
Pterodactyl had a strong start and a lot of talented contributors put real work into it. But after the original maintainer stepped back and handed it off, development slowed down. Pull requests sat for months, good ideas weren’t getting accepted, and people who were actively improving the ecosystem felt like they couldn’t get any ideas through.
Over time, most of the core contributors drifted away. The people who were pushing the panel forward eventually regrouped and created Pelican (basically a continuation of Pterodactyl built the way they wanted to continue it).
Pterodactyl itself stopped evolving. Updates were mostly dependency bumps. Big features never landed. The codebase is aging but it doesn’t die overnight. It just slowly becomes impossible to realistically maintain or extend without rewriting half of it.
Pelican fixed a lot of pain points, but the AGPLv3 license introduces its own restrictions. If you modify the panel and run it publicly, those changes must be open-sourced or you need a commercial license. That’s not wrong but it’s just not for everyone.
So the options became:
stick with Pterodactyl’s outdated code and slow development
use Pelican and accept the licensing terms
or start fresh
Starting fresh won.