Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Oracle VM VirtualBox pros and cons

Vendor: Oracle

4.1 out of 5

65 reviews
91% willing to recommend

3,452 followers

Pros & Cons summary

Oracle VM VirtualBox offers an isolated environment supporting platforms like Windows and Linux, designed for desktop use rather than servers. The open-source solution provides features like snapshots for test environments but faces flexibility and stability challenges. Installation is straightforward yet complex, and while it excels in command-line usage, support needs improvement. Despite this, it remains versatile with ease of administration, though some competitors outperform on reliability and support timelines.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

VirtualBox offers a highly stable and scalable environment with versatility across multiple operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Mac.

Users benefit from an open-source platform that enables modifications and customization for specific needs.

Its cloning and snapshot features provide valuable tools for creating test environments and protecting data.

VirtualBox's ease of installation and configuration makes it accessible for users with minimal training or technical knowledge.

The ability to create and manage virtual machines via a command-line interface enhances its functionality compared to other desktop virtualization products.

CONS

Oracle VM VirtualBox needs improvement in business continuity planning, disaster and recovery management, and using centralized data storage.

Oracle VM VirtualBox's technical support needs to improve.

Oracle VM VirtualBox lacks flexibility compared to VMware.

Oracle VM VirtualBox has issues with installation and stability.

Oracle VM VirtualBox struggles with CPU, memory, and hardware usage.

Oracle VM VirtualBox Pros review quotes

WS

Werner-Schonborn

Product Specialist at Schoemans Technologies

Oct 16, 2019

This product is extremely easy to install, use, has a great GUI and is incredibly stable.

Read full review

reviewer1447101

Director of Engineering at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees

Dec 16, 2020

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.

Read full review

EN

IT Manager at a non-tech company with 51-200 employees

Oct 28, 2019

This is a good and easy solution for running virtual environments.

Read full review

Oracle VM VirtualBox

Free Report: Oracle VM VirtualBox Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Oracle VM VirtualBox. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: May 2025.

856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.

reviewer1766661

IT Architect - AI at CGI

Jan 22, 2022

It is easy to use and does not require complex knowledge.

Read full review

Tanvir Siddique

Technical Officer at ADN Telecom

May 26, 2025

The most valuable feature is the seamlessness.

Read full review

IS

Senior Principal Consultant at CCE

Nov 28, 2018

This solution creates a snapshot of virtual machines so you can create test environments.

Read full review

reviewer1197474

Head Of Information Technology at a media company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Oct 16, 2019

The most valuable feature is the ability to copy bidirectionally between the desktop and the virtual machine.

Read full review

IT Manager at TGR

May 11, 2022

It's very simple to use.

Read full review

SG

Satishbabu Gunukula, Oracle ACE

Sr. Tech Systems Architect at Intuitive

Jun 1, 2022

Oracle VM Virtualbox is easy to use and does not require much training.

Read full review

IT Manager at TGR

Jul 29, 2020

The solution is very convenient and easy to use.

Read full review

Show 10 more reviews (out of 43)

Oracle VM VirtualBox Cons review quotes

WS

Werner-Schonborn

Product Specialist at Schoemans Technologies

Oct 16, 2019

It could improve slightly with enhanced reporting capabilities that show the current status of the network.

Read full review

reviewer1447101

Director of Engineering at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees

Dec 16, 2020

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.

Read full review

EN

IT Manager at a non-tech company with 51-200 employees

Oct 28, 2019

This should have better support for multiple network cards and some parts of the GUI should be improved.

Read full review

Oracle VM VirtualBox

Free Report: Oracle VM VirtualBox Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Oracle VM VirtualBox. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: May 2025.

856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.

reviewer1766661

IT Architect - AI at CGI

Jan 22, 2022

Having live migrations to move a running server to other hardware would be great.

Read full review

Tanvir Siddique

Technical Officer at ADN Telecom

May 26, 2025

If there were more API access so that I could run it headlessly, similar to Proxmox where I can use API, it would be useful.

Read full review

IS

Senior Principal Consultant at CCE

Nov 28, 2018

I think that this solution should be more user-friendly.

Read full review

reviewer1197474

Head Of Information Technology at a media company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Oct 16, 2019

It should have the functionality where if I move the mouse away from one screen, the context changes automatically.

Read full review

IT Manager at TGR

May 11, 2022

Basically, the GUI and command-line interface need improvement.

Read full review

SG

Satishbabu Gunukula, Oracle ACE

Sr. Tech Systems Architect at Intuitive

Jun 1, 2022

The user interface needs to be improved.

Read full review

IT Manager at TGR

Jul 29, 2020

The solution needs to improve the methods used for starting and stopping the machine.

Read full review

Show 10 more reviews (out of 41)

Product Categories

Product Categories

Server Virtualization Software

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Proxmox VE vs Oracle VM VirtualBox

VMware vSphere vs Oracle VM VirtualBox

Hyper-V vs Oracle VM VirtualBox

KVM vs Oracle VM VirtualBox

Nutanix AHV Virtualization vs Oracle VM VirtualBox

Oracle VM vs Oracle VM VirtualBox

Citrix XenServer vs Oracle VM VirtualBox

RHEV vs Oracle VM VirtualBox

IBM PowerVM vs Oracle VM VirtualBox

XCP-ng virtualization platform vs Oracle VM VirtualBox

OpenVZ vs Oracle VM VirtualBox

VMware ESXi vs Oracle VM VirtualBox

NVIDIA virtual GPU (vGPU) vs Oracle VM VirtualBox

See all alternatives

Product Categories

Product Categories

Server Virtualization Software

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Proxmox VE vs Oracle VM VirtualBox

VMware vSphere vs Oracle VM VirtualBox

Hyper-V vs Oracle VM VirtualBox

KVM vs Oracle VM VirtualBox

Nutanix AHV Virtualization vs Oracle VM VirtualBox

Oracle VM vs Oracle VM VirtualBox

Citrix XenServer vs Oracle VM VirtualBox

RHEV vs Oracle VM VirtualBox

IBM PowerVM vs Oracle VM VirtualBox

XCP-ng virtualization platform vs Oracle VM VirtualBox

OpenVZ vs Oracle VM VirtualBox

VMware ESXi vs Oracle VM VirtualBox

NVIDIA virtual GPU (vGPU) vs Oracle VM VirtualBox

See all alternatives

Related questions

229

What Is The Biggest Difference Between KVM And Oracle VM VirtualBox?

119

How does Proxmox VE compare with Oracle VM VirtualBox?

20

How does KVM compare to Oracle VM VirtualBox?

13

Which way is better for hosting Windows 10 VMs: Oracle Linux 8.4 with KVM or with VirtualBox?

7

How does Proxmox VE compare with Oracle VM VirtualBox?

38

What is the difference between Oracle VM VirtualBox Enterprise and Oracle VM Premier?

39

When evaluating Server Virtualization Software, what aspect do you think is the most important to look for?

2,724

VMware ESXi or VMware Workstation?

15

VMware vs. Hyper-V - Which do you prefer?

12

How does VMware ESXi compare to alternative virtualization solutions?