What is the best alternative to Oracle VirtualBox?

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VMWare Workstation

Andris Pelcbergs
Jon Brown

Pro
Works with Vagrant

Works with Vagrant, an awesome tool for managing and deploying virtual machine images.
Chloe Montanez
Dagmara Szyszka

Pro
High-availability

There is very little to no downtime of the Virtual desktops that are hosted in a datacenter.
Andris Pelcbergs

Pro
Can do snapshots

Workstation is capable of taking whole-system snapshots and writing them to a backing file.
joelthelion

Con
No snapshotting support in the free version

See 2 more Pros
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Parallels Desktop

Andris Pelcbergs
Abdullah

Pro
Easy to use

Parallels has an easy to learn and use UI. All important features are wizard based. It requires only a few clicks for the wizard to download and set up the latest Chrome OS, Windows or Linux build.
Andris Pelcbergs
Abdullah

Pro
Best-in-class gaming performance

Compared to other VMs, Parallels has the best gaming performance. Still, a good framerate can only be achieved with games that have very low resource requirements. A much better option for resource intensive games is dual booting Windows (via Boot Camp).
Andris Pelcbergs
Abdullah

Pro
Can run Windows apps as native OS X apps

Parallels has a "Coherence View" mode that allows running Windows applications as if they were native OS X apps. In this mode Windows is virtualized in background and Windows features like Jump Lists, Taskbar, Start Menu, etc can be embedded directly within OS X.
Adam Fields

Con
Home edition doesn't work with Vagrant or Docker Machine

Make sure you purchase the Pro edition (the subscription) if you need command-line access to the hypervisor.
Andris Pelcbergs
Abdullah

Con
Requires buying a new version of the software with each new OS X release

Chances are that the same version of Parallels won't work with different OS X releases, requiring a separate purchase of Parallels for each OS X version.
Sorin Ionuț Sbârnea

Con
Very expensive

Parallels upgrades are very expensive. Even if I bough several versions of Parallels I will switch back to free VirtualBox as they even "invented" the Pro version - mainly doubled the price you have to pay each year to have the software updated.
See 2 more Pros & ConsSee 6 more Pros & Cons
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