We performed a comparison between Oracle VM VirtualBox and Proxmox VE based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Oracle VM VirtualBox and Proxmox VE had a similar user rating regarding ease of deployment, pricing, service and support, and ROI. However, in terms of features, Oracle VM VirtualBox users felt the solution was unstable, whereas Proxmox VE users felt some bugs needed fixing.
"This product is very user-friendly and easy to use."
"Oracle VM VirtualBox is easy to use."
"The solution has high performance and is easy to use."
"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."
"The installation is easy."
"The pause feature is valuable. I can pause, which is something that not all hypervisors allow. The snapshot feature is also valuable."
"It's very simple to use."
"I like that it is free and runs on Linux/Ubuntu - I wouldn't use any other solution. I am able to perform small developing tests."
"It has a good performance and you can cluster it."
"The solution is extremely scalable."
"The affordability of the solution is the product's most valuable aspect."
"That the product is free and still has all the features you expect is a huge benefit."
"Proxmox VE is simple to use and it is feature rich. The fact is that it performs,"
"The feature that I have found most valuable is that its storage container, LVM, and everything else work out of the box."
"There are many features included with Proxmox."
"The virtualization is good."
"The AI and the UI could be improved. The user interface is a little outdated and the AI is not very attractive."
"The memory and hardware usage could be a little bit lighter. Right now, it's quite heavy on the usage. The CPU usage should be lower."
"Basically, the GUI and command-line interface need improvement."
"The installation is difficult and could be improved."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"I find the solution to be incredibly unstable, constantly falling over and not working properly."
"When I select the Ubuntu operating system from within the virtual machine, it sometimes hangs."
"The user interface needs to be improved."
"A feature which should be added is the ability to encrypt the main installation."
"The only issue I have with Proxmox VE is updating it. You have to manually update it or you have to have a way to update it automatically."
"The documentation in Proxmox VE could improve."
"It is a good solution, but it is very complicated in some ways. It is not easy. You must have experience in the console mode to do some configurations. A lot of documentation and YouTube videos are available that you can use to learn about it."
"Its performance and support can be improved. Currently, there is a cost for support."
"We have only command lines for a management application to remove sites. The solution needs a proper GUI."
"We are using servers individually, and we are looking for a reliable application that allows us to hop between servers with high availability."
"Its user interface can be improved. In the version that I am using, not all functions can be performed by using the UI. There can be some improvement on that. I'm assuming that it has already been improved in the latest version."
Oracle VM VirtualBox is ranked 5th in Server Virtualization Software with 13 reviews while Proxmox VE is ranked 2nd in Server Virtualization Software with 21 reviews. Oracle VM VirtualBox is rated 7.8, while Proxmox VE is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Oracle VM VirtualBox writes "A free and versatile open-source solution that supports multiple platforms and is easy to set up". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Proxmox VE writes "Rivaling the stiffest and competition in its category this solution suffers only from being young". Oracle VM VirtualBox is most compared with KVM, Hyper-V, VMware vSphere, Oracle VM and VMware Workstation, whereas Proxmox VE is most compared with Hyper-V, KVM, VMware vSphere, Nutanix AHV Virtualization and Citrix Hypervisor. See our Oracle VM VirtualBox vs. Proxmox VE report.
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Proxmox VE is a very fast and powerful solution. It offers feature-rich virtualization, has open-standards compliance, and also includes redundancy and failover capabilities. What I like about Proxmox VE is that it lets you rack and stack two or more nodes and enables you to be up and running with a one-node failure tolerance in very little time. Proxmox VE’s integration with ZFS is also fantastic. It allows you to create pools to store your VM images and data on very easily and their great web UI makes it easy to check drive health, ZFS scrub status, and other things. I think the best part of the web UI is that everything is configurable from the web user interface without having to use the command line. It also has graphs and additional visualizations so you can evaluate the performance of everything. Beyond that, even though you can use Proxmox VE on a single server, the solution makes it easy to set up a high availability cluster on multiple hosts if needed.
Regarding Oracle VM VirtualBox, I would say its most valuable features are its virtualization, its compatibility with older OSes, and its testing of environments without causing interruptions or any harm to production. Besides making it possible to run multiple VMs on a laptop or desktop, its ease of deployment makes the solution appealing. Not only is it easy to set up, but the software is free. Moreover, it has a nice interface. However, I think Oracle VM VirtualBox could use some improvements on its reporting as well as on its network settings for VMs, which can sometimes be hard for the average user to find and understand.
Conclusion: While Oracle is a safe and excellent option when it comes to virtualizing an operating system, I would suggest Proxmox VE because it is newer, has a lot of powerful features, and is a very reliable and stable solution.