When comparing Oracle VirtualBox vs WINE, the Slant community recommends WINE for most people. In the question“What are the best tools for running Windows games on Linux?” WINE is ranked 3rd while Oracle VirtualBox is ranked 6th.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro Open source
Pro Powerful
Does not emulate, rather it translates Windows-specific system calls.
Pro Has many front-ends (kinda)
Like Play-on-Linux, Lutris, Winetricks.
Cons
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.
Con Wine tends to favor 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 Needs additional script sometimes
This can be done automatically by using PlayOnLinux.