What is the best alternative to Oracle VirtualBox?

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score 12 · Answer 1

VMWare Workstation

Top Pro

Works with Vagrant

Works with Vagrant, an awesome tool for managing and deploying virtual machine images. See More

Top Con

No snapshotting support in the free version

Top Pro

High-availability

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

Top Con

Pro version is overpriced

The pro version which has snapshot support is ridiculously overpriced. What's worse, major releases require a brand new license, but generally don't add much more functionality. See More

Top Pro

Can do snapshots

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

Top Con

Horrible user interface

Too often you get "vm is used by another user" or "can't revert to snapshot" for whatever reasons without simple solutions. In most cases, it just throws knowledge base links to you. Not even clickable. Way overpriced. See More

Top Pro

Windows / Linux host

Can be installed on Windows and Linux systems. See More

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12 1

score 3 · Answer 2

VMWare player

Top Pro

Works well and fast with Windows host and Linux guest

Top Con

Not open source

Which means having to install their intrusive tools manually on guest linux vms. See More

Top Pro

3D graphic support

Not sure about games but WebGL works ok. See More

Top Pro

Microsoft VM support

Also supports Microsoft Virtual Server virtual machines or Microsoft Virtual PC virtual machines. See More

Top Pro

User friendly

Somewhat more user friendly than VirtualBox. See More

3 2

score 33 · Answer 3

Parallels Desktop

Top 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). See More

Top 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 More

Top 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. See More

Top Con

Can't import OVA files

OVA files are useful because they include all of its supporting files. Unfortunately, Parallels doesn't support these useful files. See More

Top 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. See More

Top 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. See More

Top Pro

Best integration ever

Top 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. See More

Top Con

Can't export OVA files

One you use parallel you get trapped into a proprietary format. Can't share disk blocks on two unrelated virtual machines (KSM for disk) too. See More

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33 25