I tried almost all control panels, but it depends on your need, your experience and comfort levels. CPanel/WHM is much better and when it comes to pricing it is worth it. As you are using it for personal use, yes it may turn expensive. You can buy a VPS with cpanel / whm free licensce or consider switching to reseller or shared web hosting. This way you do not need to pay extra for CPanel.
By the way, CPanel alternatives out there does work good, but cannot come close to CPanel. I tried everything out there which include vestacp, webmin, virtualmin, senorita, zpanel, and some other as well. I forgot names.
In the free control panels, i found webmin to be much better when it comes to vestacp. I have used vestacp recently on my kvm but it does not played well.
If you host just wordpress websites, think about serverpilot free account, that will make you host wp sites and other cms supported by them in hassle free manner. For emails you can use zoho free plan which comes with 20 free accounts for each domain. This is my suggestion if you are on KVM VDS and your resources are low and budget is low and you do not bother compromising on GUI control panel.
Thanks