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Parallels Desktop vs VMware Workstation comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 5, 2024

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

Parallels Desktop
Ranking in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
7th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Workstation
Ranking in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
57
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2026, in the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) category, the mindshare of Parallels Desktop is 4.2%, down from 13.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Workstation is 9.8%, down from 15.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Workstation9.8%
Parallels Desktop4.2%
Other86.0%
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
 

Featured Reviews

MH
Payments Architect at Self Employed
A great platform to develop interoperable code on
The decision to transition away from Intel chips to their silicon. They are processing, and there are many examples. Instead of not having a product to use for a while, they have just released it now. However, if you're seeking a product that is industry-ready regularly or has plans to make it so, considering the upcoming changes, I recommend trying out Parallels Desktop in beta. When you're only dealing with Windows, we do much in the Windows version, but it is not improving the Windows operating system. If you're hosting a Windows platform or another version of the machine, the code will have limitations. Windows is not a walled garden, with no significant volatility or instability. Windows is quite versatile. I never encountered intrusive ads or unused features, which is quite good. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.
GC
Director of IT at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Creating and destroying test machines has simplified our operations and reduced manual recovery time
The Snapshot feature has helped with workflows by allowing us to more easily reconstruct something if we lose it or need it. We've been making Snapshots on a consistent basis, mainly of servers. The VX Rail has worked effectively because we can create machines as we need them. It's helpful for resetting and has helped with our operations because I had set up failover servers on Vertex, but we don't have to do that anymore since VMware will just create a new machine immediately if we have a problem. We're doing our domain servers on there, and we've been very happy with that. We appreciate that we can create machines simply to test things out and then destroy them. I use it for a test machine for checking emails, so if the email has a virus in it, we can just destroy the machine and create a new one. We're slowly moving into the VMware environment, although the pricing with Broadcom has been a disaster.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I like how, with Parallels, you can either boot into Mac or Windows to get better control over the resources of the laptops since you're sharing the resources in dual mode."
"Parallels Desktop integrates seamlessly with macOS. It works better than VMware on Apple operating systems."
"Having ten people working off a single piece of hardware reduces costs."
"It paid for itself multiple times, especially when we had to pull in older Windows 2003 servers for disk manipulation."
"I would rate the stability a ten out of ten."
"The technical support is good."
"It is much more mature compared to Nutanix or SimpliVity when it's cross-platform based."
"The product's initial setup phase was simple."
"If you have a small-to-middle-sized environment, VMware Player is a good choice."
"Users can deploy the test machines or the VM machines on their own system and do the testing part, setting up their own lab or own test setup on their system and doing what they need."
 

Cons

"The biggest challenge is compatibility between VMware and Parallels because the two systems are incompatible. It can be challenging if you are switching between Windows and Mac. I recommend sticking with one product because there isn't good compatibility between the different products."
"There may have been some issues with device drivers on my Mac. Similarly, there are some issues with transferring data from Parallels to the Mac."
"In v6, it was a 32bit environment with a maximum memory of 4Gb RAM. Therefore, this required a high level of swap out of RAM to disk in order to provide sufficient memory space to run VMs, this occasionally caused system crashes."
"I would like to see the stability improve. We have experienced some crashes on our devices."
"There are only a few issues with compatibility between various virtualization tools. Moving virtual machines, for example, between VMware and Parallel is a challenge."
"My experience with Workstation is limited, so I don't know all the functionalities of this tool. Maybe Workstation could add some more compatibility with other vendors."
"It would be better if software updates occur automatically."
"To avoid problems you really do need to be on the most recent version, especially if you want to use W10 images."
"I would like to see more detailed reporting capabilities, particularly around snapshot activity. It would be helpful to have a summary of changes made prior to deploying an application, allowing us to provide comprehensive reports to our management on a regular basis."
"It would be helpful if VMware Workstation included an in-built monitoring tool for monitoring things."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"It is an expensive solution."
"The tool is not the cheapest."
"Licensing costs are paid on a yearly basis."
"The pricing is reasonable."
"The solution’s pricing is moderate."
"The solution is moderately priced. I rate the pricing a six out of ten."
"You need to pay for a license, but I don't think it costs that much. I think it's a one-time payment."
"The cost differs depending on the customer's requirement."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
University
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
12%
University
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise18
 

Questions from the Community

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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 needs improvement with VMware Player?
Here's what happened with us regarding the prices for VMware Workstation: we purchased everything through Dell, and as is common, we got busy and didn't get everything activated. By the time we tri...
What is your primary use case for VMware Player?
I have a bunch of VMware servers set up, including our domain servers, our data servers, and some test machines on VMware. We're not really using VMware Workstation as workstations. We've got a cou...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Lytro, University of Washington, Slalom, Veeva Systems, Oklahoma Christian University
Akademiska Hus
Find out what your peers are saying about Parallels Desktop vs. VMware Workstation and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
903,182 professionals have used our research since 2012.