Building a WHMCS Alternative with Django

Mustafamw3

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on a custom user and admin dashboard — basically a WHMCS alternative — built entirely with Python (Django) on the backend and HTML/CSS/JS on the frontend.

I chose Django because it’s secure by default and immune to most common attacks like SQL injection, XSS, and CSRF. Python also makes the code cleaner and easier to maintain compared to PHP.

It’s still under development, but here’s a screenshot of the UI — I’m focusing on making it more user-friendly and modern than typical PHP-based panels.

My road is still long, but it’s coming together nicely. 🙂
Happy to hear feedback

bikegremlin

WSS

Good luck Shaheen

bingobangobongo

Looks great! Honestly just fix all the bugs / feature list we all want / need in WHMCS and you’ll be golden lol

To me user friendly isn’t as much about looks - but more about functionality! A perfect example injustice struggled through yesterday - which shouldn’t be so hard, was to align all products existing to one billing cycle and generate a prorated invoice for the remainder of the differing periods. Should be easier than it is!

Another I built myself (quite poorly) is stock by location including configurable options… desperately needed!

Mustafamw3

@bingobangobongo said:
Looks great! Honestly just fix all the bugs / feature list we all want / need in WHMCS and you’ll be golden lol

To me user friendly isn’t as much about looks - but more about functionality! A perfect example injustice struggled through yesterday - which shouldn’t be so hard, was to align all products existing to one billing cycle and generate a prorated invoice for the remainder of the differing periods. Should be easier than it is!

Another I built myself (quite poorly) is stock by location including configurable options… desperately needed!

Thanks a lot! 😄 I totally agree — functionality is what really matters in the end.

Python has a huge ecosystem of libraries, so I don’t think I’ll be limited by features at all. There’s pretty much a module for everything — from billing and automation to APIs and monitoring.

I’m also planning to release it as open source under GPL-3, so the community will be free to edit, extend, and contribute. Hopefully it can grow into something truly community-driven and much more flexible than WHMCS.

bingobangobongo

@Mustafamw3 said:

@bingobangobongo said:
Looks great! Honestly just fix all the bugs / feature list we all want / need in WHMCS and you’ll be golden lol

To me user friendly isn’t as much about looks - but more about functionality! A perfect example injustice struggled through yesterday - which shouldn’t be so hard, was to align all products existing to one billing cycle and generate a prorated invoice for the remainder of the differing periods. Should be easier than it is!

Another I built myself (quite poorly) is stock by location including configurable options… desperately needed!

Thanks a lot! 😄 I totally agree — functionality is what really matters in the end.

Python has a huge ecosystem of libraries, so I don’t think I’ll be limited by features at all. There’s pretty much a module for everything — from billing and automation to APIs and monitoring.

I’m also planning to release it as open source under GPL-3, so the community will be free to edit, extend, and contribute. Hopefully it can grow into something truly community-driven and much more flexible than WHMCS.

LOVE THAT!! Thanks for doing the work! Keep this thread up to date with screenshots and features as it comes together, would love to see the progress!

MikeA

No offense bro but at least change the CSS. This is the default ChatGPT CSS styling when you don't give it a good enough prompt to work off of. Make sure to audit the code, or run it through a few other AI codebase tools. Edit: Could be wrong, please call me out if so! Just seen so many people recently putting together sus WHMCS alternatives with AI tools quickly.

bingobangobongo

@MikeA said:
No offense bro but at least change the CSS. This is the default ChatGPT CSS styling when you don't give it a good enough prompt to work off of. Make sure to audit the code, or run it through a few other AI codebase tools. Edit: Could be wrong, please call me out if so! Just seen so many people recently putting together sus WHMCS alternatives with AI tools quickly.

It actually looks like tailwind default blues that match together… you’re gonna hate my new website based on the comment on this styling lol

Mustafamw3

@MikeA said:
No offense bro but at least change the CSS. This is the default ChatGPT CSS styling when you don't give it a good enough prompt to work off of. Make sure to audit the code, or run it through a few other AI codebase tools. Edit: Could be wrong, please call me out if so! Just seen so many people recently putting together sus WHMCS alternatives with AI tools quickly.

No worries — it’s actually built with Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js.
The project is way too complex to be built just by an AI prompt. I do use AI to speed things up, but I’ve also got a Python book and a solid background in Django, so I know what I’m doing.

MikeA

@Mustafamw3 said:

@MikeA said:
No offense bro but at least change the CSS. This is the default ChatGPT CSS styling when you don't give it a good enough prompt to work off of. Make sure to audit the code, or run it through a few other AI codebase tools. Edit: Could be wrong, please call me out if so! Just seen so many people recently putting together sus WHMCS alternatives with AI tools quickly.

No worries — it’s actually built with Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js.
The project is way too complex to be built just by an AI prompt. I do use AI to speed things up, but I’ve also got a Python book and a solid background in Django, so I know what I’m doing.

Applaud the effort then, plus planning to make it open source.

DrNutella

Please give us super early supports lifetime deal. Ty ty

AnthonySmith

An alternative is always welcome, I will watch this closely, excellent effort!

I would add 1 thing from a business perspective, there is a difference between a day1 alternative and an alternative path, if there is no simple migration path then there will be no migration.

legendary

@Mustafamw3 said: I chose Django because it’s secure by default

That's a disaster statement and invalidates whole ordeal. Sorry, no go from my side

Mustafamw3

@legendary said:

@Mustafamw3 said: I chose Django because it’s secure by default

That's a disaster statement and invalidates whole ordeal. Sorry, no go from my side

Don’t take the statement out of context 🙂
What I said was: “I chose Django because it’s secure by default and immune to most common attacks like SQL injection, XSS, and CSRF. Python also makes the code cleaner and easier to maintain compared to PHP.”

Also, it’s open-source, so anyone is free to inspect, improve, or even criticize the code if they want.
By the way, no one’s forcing you to use it — everyone’s free to choose what works best for them. 👍

legendary

@Mustafamw3 said: Python also makes the code cleaner and easier to maintain compared to PHP.

That's should be updated with "for me" words. Because now it looks like just universal statement . Anyway, good luck competing with whmcs... I hope you will succeed and pricing would be a lot more affordable!

Mustafamw3

@legendary said:

@Mustafamw3 said: Python also makes the code cleaner and easier to maintain compared to PHP.

That's should be updated with "for me" words. Because now it looks like just universal statement . Anyway, good luck competing with whmcs... I hope you will succeed and pricing would be a lot more affordable!

It’s not just me 🙂 — but I’m not here to argue about that.
I’m also not trying to make money from it since it’s GPL-3 licensed and open-source.
I’m not competing with WHMCS either — I just wanted to build something that’s community-driven, where everyone can help improve and shape it together

georgedatacenter

When do you plan to release the source code?

yoursunny

Mentally strong people write in statically typed language to eliminate bugs.

Mustafamw3

@georgedatacenter said:
When do you plan to release the source code?

It’s a long road — a panel like this realistically takes 8–12 months. I’ve only got about 2 months into it so far, so it’s still early stage.

Once the core is stable I’ll release the full source.
If anyone is interested in contributing as a developer before that, I’m happy to share the code privately and collaborate.

AuroraZero

I’m not trying to knock your project at all, it’s an impressive challenge and I get why you’re taking it on. I just want to ask how you’re planning to handle all the payment compliance issues, not just for the US but internationally too. PCI DSS isn’t just an American thing, and a bunch of other regions have their own rules on privacy and payments. That’s basically the main reason I haven’t tried building something like this myself, it seems like a legal and technical headache if you want it to work worldwide without running into major compliance problems.

Mustafamw3

@AuroraZero said:
I’m not trying to knock your project at all, it’s an impressive challenge and I get why you’re taking it on. I just want to ask how you’re planning to handle all the payment compliance issues, not just for the US but internationally too. PCI DSS isn’t just an American thing, and a bunch of other regions have their own rules on privacy and payments. That’s basically the main reason I haven’t tried building something like this myself, it seems like a legal and technical headache if you want it to work worldwide without running into major compliance problems.

Yeah, totally — this kind of project is complex, especially with global compliance involved.
Originally, I built it for my own use (and not just for hosting) — I wanted something flexible and modern.
For payments, I’m using Stripe Checkout(redirect-based), so no card data or tokens are ever stored(all card data and tokens are stored securely on Stripe’s side, not in my system) — Stripe takes care of subscriptions and PCI compliance.
Since it’s fully open-source, I’m really counting on the community to help shape it, improve it, and make it work smoothly for all regions.

willie

I've thought that the web stack was a fairly straightforward part of this, and there were more headaches about the container and VM provisioning, monitoring, configuration UI, yada yada. Also there's still something like subscriptions in terms of the emails you have to send out. Just not automatic CC charges, which Stripe handles. It does seem doable and WHMCS has been a grift for way too long. Best of luck!

prenhost

It's a good idea, but it needs a strong team to succeed.

djonesuk

Built in Django you say? Maybe call it Unchained!

Advin

@AuroraZero said:
I’m not trying to knock your project at all, it’s an impressive challenge and I get why you’re taking it on. I just want to ask how you’re planning to handle all the payment compliance issues, not just for the US but internationally too. PCI DSS isn’t just an American thing, and a bunch of other regions have their own rules on privacy and payments. That’s basically the main reason I haven’t tried building something like this myself, it seems like a legal and technical headache if you want it to work worldwide without running into major compliance problems.

With Stripe, PayPal, and other gateways, it's really not as big of a deal as it used to be because you're not storing any payment information on your own servers.

AuroraZero

@Advin said:

@AuroraZero said:
I’m not trying to knock your project at all, it’s an impressive challenge and I get why you’re taking it on. I just want to ask how you’re planning to handle all the payment compliance issues, not just for the US but internationally too. PCI DSS isn’t just an American thing, and a bunch of other regions have their own rules on privacy and payments. That’s basically the main reason I haven’t tried building something like this myself, it seems like a legal and technical headache if you want it to work worldwide without running into major compliance problems.

With Stripe, PayPal, and other gateways, it's really not as big of a deal as it used to be because you're not storing any payment information on your own servers.

Understand totally I will keep my nose out of things from here on out.

WSS

@AuroraZero said:

@Advin said:

@AuroraZero said:
I’m not trying to knock your project at all, it’s an impressive challenge and I get why you’re taking it on. I just want to ask how you’re planning to handle all the payment compliance issues, not just for the US but internationally too. PCI DSS isn’t just an American thing, and a bunch of other regions have their own rules on privacy and payments. That’s basically the main reason I haven’t tried building something like this myself, it seems like a legal and technical headache if you want it to work worldwide without running into major compliance problems.

With Stripe, PayPal, and other gateways, it's really not as big of a deal as it used to be because you're not storing any payment information on your own servers.

Understand totally I will keep my nose out of things from here on out.

It's not like he's self-hosting through WordPress.

AuroraZero

@WSS said:

@AuroraZero said:

@Advin said:

@AuroraZero said:
I’m not trying to knock your project at all, it’s an impressive challenge and I get why you’re taking it on. I just want to ask how you’re planning to handle all the payment compliance issues, not just for the US but internationally too. PCI DSS isn’t just an American thing, and a bunch of other regions have their own rules on privacy and payments. That’s basically the main reason I haven’t tried building something like this myself, it seems like a legal and technical headache if you want it to work worldwide without running into major compliance problems.

With Stripe, PayPal, and other gateways, it's really not as big of a deal as it used to be because you're not storing any payment information on your own servers.

Understand totally I will keep my nose out of things from here on out.

It's not like he's self-hosting through WordPress.

Can not comment man I said I would keep my nose out and I will.

Not my circus not my monkies bro.

WSS

@AuroraZero said:

@WSS said:

@AuroraZero said:

@Advin said:

@AuroraZero said:
I’m not trying to knock your project at all, it’s an impressive challenge and I get why you’re taking it on. I just want to ask how you’re planning to handle all the payment compliance issues, not just for the US but internationally too. PCI DSS isn’t just an American thing, and a bunch of other regions have their own rules on privacy and payments. That’s basically the main reason I haven’t tried building something like this myself, it seems like a legal and technical headache if you want it to work worldwide without running into major compliance problems.

With Stripe, PayPal, and other gateways, it's really not as big of a deal as it used to be because you're not storing any payment information on your own servers.

Understand totally I will keep my nose out of things from here on out.

It's not like he's self-hosting through WordPress.

Can not comment man I said I would keep my nose out and I will.

Not my circus not my monkies bro.

You're the monkey.

somik

@AuroraZero said:
Not my circus not my monkies bro.

Is . . . is that . . . is that an actual saying?!?

thæn again, this is how I imagine LowEndSprit would look if it was a room:

hzhoanglee

From my own point of view, building a portal to automate the process of payment, hosting/server provision is easy and can be done quickly nowadays. But, the reason why people are still messing with WHMCS is the ecosystem, the plugins, the tons of business use cases that the hosting companies ask for (tax, costs,...), the reliability and they have a community of professional users.

That's can not be built in just a short period of time to be an alternative. It need to be built and maintain for many years to reach a somewhere of what WHMCS is covering.

And good luck btw

MannDude

@hzhoanglee said:
From my own point of view, building a portal to automate the process of payment, hosting/server provision is easy and can be done quickly nowadays. But, the reason why people are still messing with WHMCS is the ecosystem, the plugins, the tons of business use cases that the hosting companies ask for (tax, costs,...), the reliability and they have a community of professional users.

That's can not be built in just a short period of time to be an alternative. It need to be built and maintain for many years to reach a somewhere of what WHMCS is covering.

And good luck btw

I've got no experience in this area, so I'm just making some wide assumptions:

• Most gateways have pretty thorough API documentation
• Most software and control panel used in the industry have thorough API documentation (Proxmox, VirtFusion, Virtualizor, even just raw dogging libvirt, etc)

I'd reckon that the easiest part is accepting payment and getting services auto-deployed, but will go out on a limb and assume that the real challenge is making a halfway decent administrative area that makes it suitable for business use. Clients will be happy to just see that their services are online, can review some historical data (invoices paid, service provisioning dates, etc) and with a fancy UI. But I'd say the admin side of things is the real challenge, things like proper accounting, action logging, searching with unique and specific filters for all sorts of things, etc. I'm not a coder so perhaps I'm overthinking it.

Hopefully the project does well. We need more WHMCS contenders. I shit on WHMCS all the time but sadly it's still the best option as of now. We're messing with Blesta on the side to see about using it for some things (not a full WHMCS replacement), but still undecided if it's worth managing two systems especially when one (Blesta) will require a lot of custom dev stuff for us to be happy with it. (Mainly wanting to move domains and DNS related stuff away from WHMCS so we're not getting placed in costlier licensing tiers because of a ton of 'active clients' who net little profit)

SharedGrid

@MannDude said:

@hzhoanglee said:
From my own point of view, building a portal to automate the process of payment, hosting/server provision is easy and can be done quickly nowadays. But, the reason why people are still messing with WHMCS is the ecosystem, the plugins, the tons of business use cases that the hosting companies ask for (tax, costs,...), the reliability and they have a community of professional users.

That's can not be built in just a short period of time to be an alternative. It need to be built and maintain for many years to reach a somewhere of what WHMCS is covering.

And good luck btw

I've got no experience in this area, so I'm just making some wide assumptions:

• Most gateways have pretty thorough API documentation
• Most software and control panel used in the industry have thorough API documentation (Proxmox, VirtFusion, Virtualizor, even just raw dogging libvirt, etc)

I'd reckon that the easiest part is accepting payment and getting services auto-deployed, but will go out on a limb and assume that the real challenge is making a halfway decent administrative area that makes it suitable for business use. Clients will be happy to just see that their services are online, can review some historical data (invoices paid, service provisioning dates, etc) and with a fancy UI. But I'd say the admin side of things is the real challenge, things like proper accounting, action logging, searching with unique and specific filters for all sorts of things, etc. I'm not a coder so perhaps I'm overthinking it.

Hopefully the project does well. We need more WHMCS contenders. I shit on WHMCS all the time but sadly it's still the best option as of now. We're messing with Blesta on the side to see about using it for some things (not a full WHMCS replacement), but still undecided if it's worth managing two systems especially when one (Blesta) will require a lot of custom dev stuff for us to be happy with it. (Mainly wanting to move domains and DNS related stuff away from WHMCS so we're not getting placed in costlier licensing tiers because of a ton of 'active clients' who net little profit)

I completely agree with this. We are currently building out our own portal that will be in-house only. Taking payment and the service auto deploying is easy, we could have had this accomplished within hours of starting the project because we're linking into Stripe, we get a webhook to say payment was successful then we tap into Enhance or Virtfusion to say setup the service.

However the real work is tying everything together, especially the orders, services and invoicing together - something we were working on yesterday is when a order is refunded, it needs to be marked as refunded, refund the payment via Stripe, suspend the service, mark the invoice as refunded and then create a credit note invoice. It's easy to think 'ah, just have a refund button' but then it's the amount of actions that need to be kicked off after this, ensure every action was successful, it if wasn't successful then handle this.

We avoid WHMCS because it's Webpros and we try to avoid them where possible. We switched from Clientexec to Blesta around a year ago because it worked better for us. Blesta is great because it's so customisable being mostly open but then you have to consider this every time there is an update, but the third party plugins that we rely on are mostly paid and encoded; we can't change their behaviour or fix bugs and need to rely on third party devs to fix them which takes time.

I commend @Mustafamw3 for doing something like this to eventually open source it - it's a lot of work.

arham321

I think systemd is a personality trait.

Mustafamw3

Update:

The client view/dashboard is nearly complete. I’ve started working on the admin area, which will take a bit longer.

Mustafamw3

For anyone interested in the current structure, the project is split into modular apps:

├── project/ (core configuration: settings, urls)
├── accounts/ (user accounts)
├── billing/ (billing & payments)
├── dashboard/ (dashboard)
├── download_service/ (file downloads)
├── hosting_service/ (hosting-related services)
├── license_service/ (license management)
├── orders/ (order handling)
├── products/ (product definitions)
├── services/ (service logic)
├── support/ (support / ticketing)
├── static/ (CSS, JS, images)
├── templates/ (HTML templates)

Still early days, but the goal is to keep everything modular and easy to extend. I’ll post further updates once there’s more progress on the admin side.

Chievo

@Mustafamw3 said:
Update:

The client view/dashboard is nearly complete. I’ve started working on the admin area, which will take a bit longer.

Congrats looks cool!

Chievo

@Mustafamw3 said:
For anyone interested in the current structure, the project is split into modular apps:

├── project/ (core configuration: settings, urls)
├── accounts/ (user accounts)
├── billing/ (billing & payments)
├── dashboard/ (dashboard)
├── download_service/ (file downloads)
├── hosting_service/ (hosting-related services)
├── license_service/ (license management)
├── orders/ (order handling)
├── products/ (product definitions)
├── services/ (service logic)
├── support/ (support / ticketing)
├── static/ (CSS, JS, images)
├── templates/ (HTML templates)

Still early days, but the goal is to keep everything modular and easy to extend. I’ll post further updates once there’s more progress on the admin side.

Just saying ( do not take it personally,just my 2 cents ) a website with a roadmap would be even better so people interested or working over the project could add things see the progress and so on . It improves a lot the process in matter of early adopters and so on if they feel engaged to it. Obviously just my opinion.

Mustafamw3

@Chievo said:

@Mustafamw3 said:
For anyone interested in the current structure, the project is split into modular apps:

├── project/ (core configuration: settings, urls)
├── accounts/ (user accounts)
├── billing/ (billing & payments)
├── dashboard/ (dashboard)
├── download_service/ (file downloads)
├── hosting_service/ (hosting-related services)
├── license_service/ (license management)
├── orders/ (order handling)
├── products/ (product definitions)
├── services/ (service logic)
├── support/ (support / ticketing)
├── static/ (CSS, JS, images)
├── templates/ (HTML templates)

Still early days, but the goal is to keep everything modular and easy to extend. I’ll post further updates once there’s more progress on the admin side.

Just saying ( do not take it personally,just my 2 cents ) a website with a roadmap would be even better so people interested or working over the project could add things see the progress and so on . It improves a lot the process in matter of early adopters and so on if they feel engaged to it. Obviously just my opinion.

I haven’t created a website for it yet mainly because I haven’t settled on a project name. Once that’s decided, I’ll put a site and roadmap together. Open to name suggestions from the community.

Chievo

@Mustafamw3 said:

@Chievo said:

@Mustafamw3 said:
For anyone interested in the current structure, the project is split into modular apps:

├── project/ (core configuration: settings, urls)
├── accounts/ (user accounts)
├── billing/ (billing & payments)
├── dashboard/ (dashboard)
├── download_service/ (file downloads)
├── hosting_service/ (hosting-related services)
├── license_service/ (license management)
├── orders/ (order handling)
├── products/ (product definitions)
├── services/ (service logic)
├── support/ (support / ticketing)
├── static/ (CSS, JS, images)
├── templates/ (HTML templates)

Still early days, but the goal is to keep everything modular and easy to extend. I’ll post further updates once there’s more progress on the admin side.

Just saying ( do not take it personally,just my 2 cents ) a website with a roadmap would be even better so people interested or working over the project could add things see the progress and so on . It improves a lot the process in matter of early adopters and so on if they feel engaged to it. Obviously just my opinion.

I haven’t created a website for it yet mainly because I haven’t settled on a project name. Once that’s decided, I’ll put a site and roadmap together. Open to name suggestions from the community.

AireOso ( air+ O (oxygen) + oso ( Bear ) 🐻)

BlaZe

What name are you going to give it?

imok

WHDJangoMCS