When comparing PlayOnLinux vs Oracle VirtualBox, the Slant community recommends PlayOnLinux for most people. In the question“What are the best tools for running Windows games on Linux?” PlayOnLinux is ranked 1st while Oracle VirtualBox is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose PlayOnLinux is:
PlayOnLinux features a really easy to use interface.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Easy to use
PlayOnLinux features a really easy to use interface.
Pro Works with Vagrant
Works with Vagrant, an awesome tool for managing and deploying virtual machine images.
Pro Free, mostly open source and cross-platform
VirtualBox is available for free with source code available here. A "VirtualBox Extension Pack" that includes virtual USB 2.0, VirtualBox RDP & PXE boot support is available only under a commercial license. VirtualBox is available on Windows, Linux, OSX and Solaris.
Pro Can do snapshots
VirtualBox is capable of taking whole-system snapshots and writing them to a backing file.
Cons
Con Wine favors some hardware over others
Tends to work better with nVidia graphics on an Intel CPU, even when an AMD CPU or graphics chip would normally perform better than the given equivalent part from Intel/nVidia
Con Requires Wine
PlayOnLinux is just a wrapper around Wine, this means that besides PlayOnLinux, you will also have to install Wine.
Con Nowhere near native level performance
Some games and programs flat out just don't work or aren't compatible, and most games take a performance hit over running it native on Windows
Con Inferior performance
Apart from second-class performance in virtualization, there are some visual glitches with Windows 8.1 on Mavericks.
Con Confusing interface and lacking usability features
VirtualBox might be a bit confusing for beginners - it requires an understanding of a lot more technical details than other VMs.