New Project Leadership

Note

See @DaneEveritt's comment below.

This conversation is temporarily locked due to the volume of spam comments.

Who are we?

• Infraly specializes in revolutionizing technology infrastructure to empower developers. We’re based out of Allentown, PA, and have been operating since January 2020. We currently manage a popular fork of Pterodactyl called WISP.

What are your plans with Pterodactyl?

• We’re keeping to the core mission of Pterodactyl - a free, open-source game server management panel built for everyone. This means the MIT licensing will remain the same and will not be changing.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

[luketeam5]

Are there any commercial plans you have with pterodactyl?

Pterodactyl will stay free & open-source. No changes to license.

[Googletod12355]

god dont make it shit

[Lovinoes]

fr

[Envexus]

Okay, but what are you going to do to make this better than Pelican?

Pelican and Pterodactyl are two separate projects, with different goals. Our current plans are to do general house keeping and continue to accept contributions

[DaneEveritt]

I would also like to clarify that I have been friends with many of the Pelican developers for close to a decade now, and deeply respect them and the work they do. I'm not sure why people seem to believe one or the other needs to be "better". Both projects exist to solve different user needs and represent the very nature of open-source (and the reason why I made Pterodactyl open-source 10 years ago): that people can fork your work and make changes as they see fit to solve their own needs.

I'm not sure where this animosity between the projects is coming from with people, but it is silly and doesn't help anyone. I've talked to my friends at Pelican many times, especially in the last few days, and we're all here to support each other and help each project succeed. There is more than enough space in this industry for a little friendly competition and diverging panels.

[mechite]

(also, Pelican is licensed under the AGPL. Pterodactyl appears to not have plans to do this).

[MrRinkana]

Could you clarify

Both projects exist to solve different user needs

As a glance both projects target the exact same usecase, clarifying which is more the goal would help! Or at least its another way to state project direction!

[anthonyphysgun]

Pterodactyl is free and open source. Pelican is AGPL.

You can't fork Pelican and keep your changes private. Pterodactyl is yours to do what you want with. No strings attached.

[Upoka123]

hello 👋🏻
I want to ask if there will be changes and fixes regarding the scheduler system of Pterodactyl Panel?

[Chautoo]

There are already new features planned or other QoL improvements?

For example will the panel get better handling for installing plugins? For now it can be very difficult to install Plugins without breaking the panel.

[FayKn]

less gooo, as one of the bigger addon devs really excited what'll come from this!

[DeJayDev]

While it may be a strange time to have announced this (the weekend before a major holiday?) welcome to the helm. When possible, I and many others would love to know your roadmap here. What will happen to WISP and (more importantly) what will happen to Pterodactyl/wings?

[DaneEveritt]

This was answered above, but for clarity as to what will happen: nothing.

This is a permanent promise. Pterodactyl will always be free, and open source. ¹

[DaneEveritt]

We're still working on a roadmap. There is obviously a lot to catch up on with this project and many many maintenance tasks to knock out before we can start churning out new code.

[philip-ulrich]

I feel like it's a bit "too little, too late" for this and given that the company that is "taking the project over" already runs a fork of the project that they bill for... I don't see the upside for anyone. I think I'll probably just stick with Pelican.

[prplwtf]

Pelican doesn't seem to be any less for-profit, but I'm highly skeptical about the future of the panel considering this change.

[TekExplorer]

Not really? you only need to pay if you both keep it private and modify the core code.
if you keep it open, youre fine.
if you make a plugin, you can keep that private just fine.

Worst case scenario, you contribute improvements to that system, or just keep those hooks public, if not the plugin

[prplwtf]

Yeah I'm just saying both sides seem for-profit. Pelican and Pterodactyl.

I think this reply should cover your questions :)

https://github.com/orgs/pterodactyl/discussions/5445#discussioncomment-15312678

[DaneEveritt]

I would also add that I (personally) would not have come back to this project to help continue to support it if I did not believe in Infraly and their ability to help Pterodactyl succeed long into the future.

A project of this scale requires an inordinate amount of time for a solo-developer to maintain. There are tens of thousands of voices requesting features, filing bug tickets, asking questions, and generally just existing and requiring moderation. All of that is before we even consider the time required to build, test, maintain, and manage the project. A company managing the project is far better for long-term maintenance, stability, and security than a single developer. Many large open-source projects run this way. It is a big change for the community right now, but I truly believe this is in the best interests of the project long-term.

I didn't spend almost 8 years building the project to watch it fall into disrepair because of its own unbelievable success. 😅

[memwm]

Hello Leadership and everyone,
To build a solid plan for Pterodactyl, I believe it’s important that we have a dedicated testing environment. I’m willing to take the initiative in Vietnam to help introduce and promote Pterodactyl more widely within the local community.

I will fully cover the server costs for this testing environment. If Leadership is interested, please feel free to reply directly here.

At the moment, I’m building a Vietnam-based community focused on learning and using Pterodactyl. I hope we can work together on a clear plan in the near future, and I’d be glad to contribute to the long-term growth of the community.

We would love to have a demo env up at some point! Feel free to reach out to me on Discord if you have any questions on how we can work together to grow the project!

https://discord.gg/pterodactyl

[memwm]

We would love to have a demo env up at some point! Feel free to reach out to me on Discord if you have any questions on how we can work together to grow the project!

https://discord.gg/pterodactyl

I don't know who to contact, or where to contact them within the Pterodactyl Discord community

[anthonyphysgun]

Feel free to reach out to me directly, my discord name is "physgun"

[memwm]

Feel free to reach out to me directly, my discord name is "physgun"

I sent a friend request

[YelehaUwU]

Are you planning to expand pterodactyl with new features like this one for example, or will it just be maintaining?
#2757 (comment)

For now, there is a lot of cleaning up to do. I'm sure in the future we will start accepting new feature contributions!

[shark711]

Is it just me or does that create a conflict of interest between Pterodactyl (Free) and WISP (Paid)?

I think this reply should cover your questions :)

https://github.com/orgs/pterodactyl/discussions/5445#discussioncomment-15312678

[Danieljunek17]

I see a lot of questions but for now you don't really seem to reply to any concerns or other valid reactions, is there any eta on this?

Now :)

[liorsl]

Will Pterodactyl adopt major new features? Is there a roadmap you can share / just your thought on how the project should look like in the future

[anthonyphysgun]

Dane's current focus is cleaning up the project and fixing bugs. After this we will sort out a plan Im sure!

[HerrSammyDE]

Will there be significant improvements to the Wings?

As has already been done by community members, such as here: Rene-Roscher/wings#1

[anthonyphysgun]

Dane's current focus is cleaning up the project and fixing bugs. Rene is welcome to create a PR and we can take a look!

[HerrSammyDE]

Have there been any discussions about transferring the project to the Linux Foundation and/or the CNCF - similar to what’s being done with Agones (K8s for game servers)?

• Proposal: Migrate Agones to the Linux Foundation googleforgames/agones#4304
• [Sandbox] Agones cncf/sandbox#440

No, this is not planned.

[Cartitarul]

1. How does the Pterodactyl team view the growing feature gap compared to panels like Wisp and Pelican that ship with more functionality out of the box?

2. Are there plans to introduce an official addon or plugin system within the core panel to allow easier feature expansion?

3. In recent years, development has focused heavily on security, are broader feature updates or usability improvements planned?

4. What steps are being taken to ensure existing hosts and users remain confident in Pterodactyl as a long-term solution?

To give some context, I have been a Pterodactyl user for years, both for business and personal use. Recently, however, it has started to feel outdated in terms of features. Because of this, I see two options: help contribute to its development or migrate to another panel, hopefully the first option.

[DaneEveritt]

Howdy — answering from a maintainer perspective, defer to @anthonyphysgun for Infraly's official take on some of these.

1. WISP is now under the Pterodactyl umbrella, so the feature gap will likely close or help Pterodactyl's core since there is plenty of stuff to backport to make maintenance and building a more custom solution easier. Think API simplification, additional endpoints, foundations to build custom features more easily. As for Pelican, as I commented above I really like that project and think it was honestly about time that a significant fork happened. I'm sure we'll catch up on some features (and we've already discussed with them some things to potentially backport), and there will be other features unique to them and their offerings.
2. I defer to @anthonyphysgun on this.
3. Yes, new features and usability are definitely planned. Things went incredibly stale around here so there is unfortunately a lot of dust to blow off, but once that happens things should begin progressing forwards more quickly. I know there are a lot of random cleanup things I want to do (tooling, tests, removal of dependencies that don't make sense in 2026) but with the Infraly team on the project too we should have plenty of maintainers to go around building and reviewing work!
4. Again defer to @anthonyphysgun for official statements on this, but from my personal take: I'm committed to being back and present with the project. Trying to manage the community and everything that came with it, building new features, handling bugs and support, and my regular full-time job and hobies was horrific, which is why I stepped away. Its become clear this project is unsustainable by any individual user, and Infraly's management and support of the project should make it easier for multiple people to contribute and keep building more and more functionality without completely overloading any one person. I'm much more excited to work on Pterodactyl knowing that there will be more hands available, and not every decision, feature, or bug report has to be my own to handle. Burnout is incredibly real with this project, so more people to handle things should help ensure longevity.

[anthonyphysgun]

2. We absolutely agree this is something that needs to be explored. It’s a very complex problem, and getting it right matters more than moving quickly, so this is something we want to do our homework on. At this stage it’s still under evaluation.

3. This closely aligns with what Dane outlined. Our priority is growing and strengthening the contributor community around Pterodactyl. To support that, 100% of sponsor funds are being directed back to the people who are actively contributing the most to the project.

[HerrSammyDE]

Are there plans to enable Wings to be operated via Kubernetes in the future?

[DaneEveritt]

None that I am aware of.