We performed a comparison between KVM and Oracle VM VirtualBox based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Both KVM and Oracle VM VirtualBox have their strengths and weaknesses. Oracle VM VirtualBox seems to be the more favorable choice of the two, since it offers good scalability whereas scalability seems to be an ongoing issue for KVM users.
"Scaling the solution is easy. You just have to add more hardware."
"The KVM service is well managed with a central policy interface."
"The product is really good...One can get good performance because of kernel-based virtualization."
"Documentation and problem-solving troubleshooting are the most valuable features. Performance (when fine-tuned and with "special" HW) is awesome, equal to or more than other enterprise closed-source solutions."
"I have found KVM to be scalable."
"I find the density of the product most valuable. It is density that a technologist can just assign page merging. This is what makes KVM one of the important players of the virtualization market."
"It is an easily scalable solution."
"I like that this is an open-source solution. It is very powerful, and it's easy."
"It is easy to use and does not require complex knowledge."
"This solution can be used on many different platforms including Windows and Linux."
"The good thing is that it is multi-platform. Once you create a virtual machine in one particular environment, you can switch over to see if you can run it in other environments. For example, if you are on Windows and you create this virtual machine, you can actually go ahead and change the operating system. You can switch it over to Linux or Mac OS and see if you can run the VirtualBox on those particular machines. It even runs on some of the commercial operating systems that are not mainstream, such as Solaris and BSD. These kinds of operating systems are also supported by VirtualBox. The other thing that is good about VirtualBox is that it is open source. So, if you need to do any modifications for your own purposes, you can just download the source, modify it, and deploy it in your environment. It is pretty good and very versatile. You can create and manipulate virtual machines from the command line, which is also very important. It's something that some other products on the desktop side do not have. VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop don't have a good command-line interface to create and manipulate virtual machines, whereas VirtualBox has it out of the box, which is pretty good."
"This is a highly scalable solution."
"The flexibility as well as performance wise and as well as data volume, we have huge volume stored."
"Technical support is good."
"The product gives us the flexibility to try different machines."
"This solution creates a snapshot of virtual machines so you can create test environments."
"Monitoring and resolution could be improved."
"The solution’s user interface could be improved and made more user-friendly."
"Lacks high availability across clusters as well as support for Apache CloudStack."
"Technical support could be better. In the next release, I would like to see an improved user interface and dashboard. This type of improvement will make it easy or help our engineers understand the solution from a requirement point of view."
"The speed is around thirty percent slower than another competitor. This would be something to work on."
"The main drawback in the solution is probably disaster recovery."
"The grid interface of KVM needs improvement. It could be more beautiful, especially when compared to VMware."
"I have encountered difficulties in getting the tool's documentation."
"The installation is difficult and could be improved."
"The AI and the UI could be improved. The user interface is a little outdated and the AI is not very attractive."
"We're working with them to be able to allow the local USB ports to be ported over to the remote desktop, running VirtualBox."
"The communications setup lags. It does not connect properly so the batching and networking is a bit slow."
"Oracle needs to improve its hot virtual machine migration. It didn't work as intended. It should allow us to migrate between virtual machines, without stopping the database."
"There are a few bugs that need to be updated."
"Having live migrations to move a running server to other hardware would be great."
"The solution is a bit less stable than I would like."
KVM is ranked 4th in Server Virtualization Software with 39 reviews while Oracle VM VirtualBox is ranked 5th in Server Virtualization Software with 61 reviews. KVM is rated 8.0, while Oracle VM VirtualBox is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of KVM writes "Delivers good performance because of kernel-based virtualization". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Oracle VM VirtualBox writes "The solution is versatile, simple to use, and stable". KVM is most compared with Proxmox VE, Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, VMware Workstation and Oracle VM, whereas Oracle VM VirtualBox is most compared with Proxmox VE, Hyper-V, Oracle VM, VMware Workstation and VMware vSphere. See our KVM vs. Oracle VM VirtualBox report.
See our list of best Server Virtualization Software vendors.
We monitor all Server Virtualization Software reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.