cPanel and Plesk are the major players in the website hosting Control Panel field.
The short answer is that the main difference between those two control panels lays in the user interface - both of the feature sets are pretty much comparable, and both are reasonably fast, secure, and reliable.
From experience, cPanel is much user friendly in comparison to Plesk. cPanel is file based control panel while plesk is database oriented. It is much easier to amend the files on cPanel server.
The good things about cPanel
It is Popular
