I use either cPanel or DirectAdmin(DA). They are both very good control panels for different reasons.
cPanel is the industry leader, but that doesn't always make it the best choice. cPanel simply has more bells and whistles than other control panels. You may or may not need them, as decent knowledge of how to use a .htaccess (for example) can eliminate several of the bells. In my case, I don't always need them. DA is much lighter on the resource footprint than cPanel, and one can edit the DNS zone from within the control panel as opposed to hopping over to WHM in the cPanel setup.
I look for DA to slowly pick up over the coming months and years. cPanel got the spring out of the gate right, and it's more widely used because it's the most ubiquitous out of all of them.