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Oracle VM VirtualBox vs VMware Workstation comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Oracle VM VirtualBox
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
65
Ranking in other categories
Server Virtualization Software (7th)
VMware Workstation
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
56
Ranking in other categories
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Virtualization solutions, they serve different purposes. Oracle VM VirtualBox is designed for Server Virtualization Software and holds a mindshare of 6.3%, down 9.7% compared to last year.
VMware Workstation, on the other hand, focuses on Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), holds 15.4% mindshare, up 15.3% since last year.
Server Virtualization Software
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
 

Featured Reviews

Tanvir Siddique - PeerSpot reviewer
Easily accesses open solutions with seamless compatibility for testing and development
The most valuable feature is the seamlessness. When I install a Linux operating system, I can use Windows applications through Oracle VM VirtualBox seamlessly. There are many applications that work only on Windows. For desktop testing purposes, I used Oracle VM VirtualBox, and it works fine. The guest OS compatibility was tremendous because I used Oracle VM VirtualBox on Linux and ran Windows applications on top of that, working seamlessly.
Shambhu Narayan  Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
An easy-to-manage solution that has really good customer support compared to other market players
VMware Workstation makes it easy to manage all the resources that we are handling. VMware Workstation has reduced our infrastructure cost. If someone wants machines, I can create them easily using the solution. VMware Workstation is easier to manage than other workstations like Oracle Workstation. VMware Workstation is an easy-to-manage solution, and its support is really good compared to other market players. Overall, I rate VMware Workstation an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It's a pretty good product in terms of monitoring."
"The solution is very convenient and easy to use."
"This is a highly scalable solution."
"It is a stable product."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that there is no cost because it is open source."
"VirtualBox provides an isolated, consistent environment"
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"The cloning is a very useful tool."
"We initially intended to work with Hyper-V because we are selling a virtual appliance and thought our customers would want to run that on Hyper-V."
"The product's initial setup phase was simple."
"The performance is good."
"The most valuable feature of VMware Player is the ability to snapshot with or without memory."
"VMware Player helps you to virtualize and install Ubuntu or any other operating system, even on a Windows laptop."
"VMware Workstation works correctly and has more features compared to Oracle VirtualBox."
"VMware Workstation is great for migrating and patching operating systems."
"The most valuable features of VMware Workstation are the speed of access and quality of upgrade. Those are the more important and pertinent aspects as far as we were concerned. Functionality and features were relevant for the customers. What a customer chose, we had to make sure that it operated."
 

Cons

"I think that this solution should be more user-friendly."
"They could improve the graphics functionality of the product."
"The solution should have more enterprise features, like migration, high availability storage, disaster recovery, and the ability to deploy to enterprise-scale usage. They should not just offer desktop usage."
"I find the solution to be incredibly unstable, constantly falling over and not working properly."
"The user interface needs to be improved."
"The AI and the UI could be improved. The user interface is a little outdated and the AI is not very attractive."
"It has some issues when you have some weird device drivers. For instance, when you have a weird sound driver working on your machine, and the VirtualBox needs to output the sound of the virtual machine into the sound driver of the physical machine, the bare metal, it doesn't work too well. If you tweak lots of drivers and play around with the different kinds of drivers and machines, you will probably break something. I have not played with it too much and maybe it already supports it, but it would probably be good to have the ability to use a container from the virtual machine environment instead of spinning off a complete virtual machine. There are other tools for that. On Linux, you have a DXE, LXC framework, and you have Docker as well. Docker is good because it is multi-platform, and you can run Docker on pretty much anything, even different processors, but it would be good if we had a VirtualBox running on it while spinning off containers instead of full virtual machines. The other thing that will become important, and I'm pretty sure that they are thinking about it as well is that there's this new hardware platform that Apple is releasing, which is an ARM-based new chip. So, VirtualBox will probably have to work on ARM-based CPUs as well."
"The solution lacks some open source remote administration tools. The reload of individual virtual machine definitions through the vboxweb service (via its API) without restarting it and the access to shared storage (to use teleport functions) need to be improved."
"Its networking features need improvement."
"They could bring in many different features from VMware vSphere to Workstation."
"The product’s virtual machine data backup feature needs upgrading."
"The big issue that we've always had with VMware, was the disparity between what was presented for a Windows-based client and a Linux-based client. The Windows client was always two or three releases ahead of the Linux client. We always wanted VMware to change and improve the feature sets between the client connector on Linux and on Windows."
"Its price could be better."
"VMware Player should provide a cloud version with no limitations to hardware resources."
"It takes too much time to load all the plug-ins and software."
"The product could provide the features available in Microsoft Hyper-V."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is free."
"Oracle should consider reducing the cost of the product."
"Pricing does not apply for us, we do not have to pay for the service."
"Available for free use"
"The license I use is free."
"It is an open-source solution."
"It is pretty good for the price, which is free."
"The product is free to use."
"With a VDI solution, there is always extra cost running a VDI solution but it's not for cost purposes anymore. In the beginning, it was to save money on hardware but at the moment it's other aspects that are more important why you should use a VDI solution."
"The tool is not the cheapest."
"The licensing costs are cheap. I pay approximately $100 per year."
"The solution’s pricing is moderate."
"VMware Workstation has a high price than competitors in the market."
"The pricing is a bit steep in my opinion for testing and there are other options."
"VMware Workstation's costs are lifetime."
"With all its support and ease of use, VMware Player's pricing is fair."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Educational Organization
9%
Computer Software Company
16%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does KVM compare to Oracle VM VirtualBox?
KVM is easy to use, stable and flexible. It is mature and very fast. It is an affordable open-source solution that is easy to set up and manage. It offers very good security. It has a virtual manag...
What do you like most about Oracle VM VirtualBox?
The product’s most valuable feature is the ability to manage multiple operating systems through one application.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle VM VirtualBox?
Maintenance is not necessary because I did not use it for heavy loads.
Which VMware solution would you go with - Workstation or vSphere?
VM Workstation’s setup is so easy, you can use it almost instantly, it works well with Windows and Linux. We like VM Workstation primarily to test environments to determine how well a solution will...
What do you like most about VMware Workstation?
The product is stable, very easy to deploy, easy to use, easy to configure, and easy to set up.
What needs improvement with VMware Workstation?
The product's integration capabilities are an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required.
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Airbus, Colorado State University, SCS Africa, Wolf Medical Systems.
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