When comparing PamPam vs XAMPP, the Slant community recommends XAMPP for most people. In the question“What are the best php localhost servers?” XAMPP is ranked 3rd while PamPam is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose XAMPP is:
Port 443 is in use from Skype. You can change the port in Skype.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Open source
Pro Run both 32bit and 64bit systems
Because it's text-based and developed by powershell.
Pro Folder structure is clear
Pro Intuitive interface
Because its very focus is on basic features.
Pro Fast to start and stop services in 3-5 seconds
Pro Enable Virtual Host and SSL default
Pro Only a language and lightweight (< 100KB)
Useful to understand and customize it.
Pro Separate your data and server data
You can change dir of your data, make it more portable, save your data safer when you upgrade and move.
Pro Version switching
You can add more package versions, so you can switch between versions.
Pro Text-Based
All files are plain text, so they're understandable and modifiable. You can upgrade and build other versions yourself.
Pro Portable
You can move it around to other locations or machines, and it still runs normally.
Pro Smooth installation with minimal configuration required
Port 443 is in use from Skype. You can change the port in Skype.
Pro Multi-platform
XAMPP runs on OS X, Linux and Windows.
Pro Clean and functional interface
Cons
Con No built-in packages
You need to manually add zip versions of packages, but you can always update latest version of packages when you want, not depending on the maker of the stack.
Con It's very new so it has some unknown and unpredictable bugs
You can debug and fix it yourself though.
Con No documentation
But it does not take long time to learn to use.
Con Setup process is not too easy for new users
Con Only for Windows
But you can customize it for other OSs.
Con Very basic features
- Change versions of packages
- Change dir your data or server data
- Start or Stop services
- Add virtual host
- Add PHP dir and MariaDB dir to user environment path
Con Very basic stack (Apache, MariaDB, PHP)
Supports not a lot of software out of the box. If you want more, you need to upgrade it yourself. Fortunately, it's all in plain text, so you can.
Con Bloated
Comes with mail server, FTP server, accelerator, web-dav, ssl out of the box, etc.
Con doesnt has phpselector
Need downgrade to use php5