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.
"Very cost-effective."
"The GUI interface makes the management of KVM easier than ever before."
"It offers a high-availability environment."
"I have found KVM to be scalable."
"Scaling the solution is easy. You just have to add more hardware."
"I like that this is an open-source solution. It is very powerful, and it's easy."
"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."
"Our production servers are running in Linux, and this solution supports that environment well."
"The versatility, simplicity, and stability of the product are it's most valuable features."
"This solution can be used on many different platforms including Windows and Linux."
"The solution is very stable."
"Oracle VM VirtualBox is easy to use."
"The installation is easy."
"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 product is extremely easy to install, use, has a great GUI and is incredibly stable."
"The cloning is a very useful tool."
"I believe KVM offers a unified answer, while ProxMark addresses orchestration. KVM lacks orchestration. If the aim is to centrally oversee multiple KVMs – let's say to freeze them – a centralized management solution is absent."
"The networking with wireless devices needs improvement."
"The solution’s user interface could be improved and made more user-friendly."
"Support for VF is needed, where you can, for example, export from VMware to KVM."
"The initial setup of this solution is more difficult than some of the competing products and it could be improved."
"The stability of this solution is less than other products in the same category."
"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."
"I have previously used VMware and KVM is easier to use. However, they both have their strengths depending on their use cases. They are mostly equal. One of VMware's advantages is it has better support."
"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."
"The technical support needs to improve."
"The user interface needs to be improved."
"Basically, the GUI and command-line interface need improvement."
"Oracle VM VirtualBox is not flexible, It's not like VMware."
"Having live migrations to move a running server to other hardware would be great."
"It would be good if we could use Hyper-V Windows subsystems with Linux and VirtualBox on the same instance. Currently, to be able to use VirtualBox, we have to restart the machine into an instance of Windows where Hyper-V is disabled, which is understandably very inconvenient."
"They could improve the graphics functionality of the product."
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.