When comparing Oracle VirtualBox vs VMWare Workstation, the Slant community recommends Oracle VirtualBox for most people. In the question“What are the best virtual machines for Ubuntu?” Oracle VirtualBox is ranked 2nd while VMWare Workstation is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Oracle VirtualBox is:
Works with [Vagrant](http://www.vagrantup.com/), an awesome tool for managing and deploying virtual machine images.
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 Works with Vagrant
Works with Vagrant, an awesome tool for managing and deploying virtual machine images.
Pro High-availability
There is very little to no downtime of the Virtual desktops that are hosted in a datacenter.
Pro Can do snapshots
Workstation is capable of taking whole-system snapshots and writing them to a backing file.
Pro Windows / Linux host
Can be installed on Windows and Linux systems.
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 No snapshotting support in the free version
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.
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.