When comparing Virtual Box vs BBEdit, the Slant community recommends Virtual Box for most people. In the question“What are the best Mac OSX apps for someone that's new to Apple?” Virtual Box is ranked 15th while BBEdit is ranked 23rd. The most important reason people chose Virtual Box is:
It works for Windows, macOS, Linux, BSD, and many others.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Compatible with Many Operating Systems
It works for Windows, macOS, Linux, BSD, and many others.
Pro Beginner friendly
A virtual machine can be set up in minutes if a ISO file to load is already available.
Pro Works well and fast for Windows host and Linux guest
Pro Free and open source
Pro Many free images available
Though most are linux flavors at https://virtualboxes.org/
Oracle's virtualbox site has others.
Pro Can do snapshots
Pro A lot of customization
VirtualBox has multiple virtualization options. Each one may be tailored to the guest operating system’s needs. This makes it especially good on virtualizing older systems, such as DOS, obscure distros, etc.
Pro Stable development, been around for decades
BBEdit is commercial software, the paid counterpart to their free application Textwrangler. Though BBEdit comes off as pricey, this allows for stable and consistent updates from the developers. BBEdit has been around since 1992.
Pro Can open very large files
Pro Just about every feature is already built in
No searching for plug-ins that may or may not work.
Pro Great customer support
The developer is very responsive to bug reports and feature suggestions.
Pro Native application
Follows platform standards.
Pro Built-in FTP/SFTP browser
BBEdit can open files directly from, and save them to, any available FTP server. It can also open and save files directly via SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol).
Pro Great JAMStack environment
You can build the static site of your dreams without needing any external assistants. Although it does not process LESS, SASS, or SCSS files, BBEdit's includes are very powerful.
Cons
Con Lacks video performance
Virtualbox has a hard cap of 256MB of video memory. This could make newer operating systems run slower.
Con Minimal CPU customization
You can only enable/disable certain features. You cannot cap the speed of the CPU, which is required to run systems such as Windows 95.
Con Featureless
Con Expensive
It's US$49.99 a single user license.