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 solution can be used on many different platforms including Windows and Linux."
"Oracle VM VirtualBox has a platform where the support team responds to frequently asked questions by its users. Every time I have had issues with Oracle VM VirtualBox, I always get a solution from Oracle's online platform or GitHub."
"Technical support is good."
"The pause feature is valuable. I can pause, which is something that not all hypervisors allow. The snapshot feature is also valuable."
"This product is very user-friendly and easy to use."
"This is a good and easy solution for running virtual environments."
"The product gives us the flexibility to try different machines."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is that its storage container, LVM, and everything else work out of the box."
"Ease of use, HA, internal 100gbps Virtio network, built-in backup (don't pay $1200 Veeam licence), support for multi-monitors on multiple VMs in KVM, no need to RDP in the VMs to do your stuff (Win, Linux and Mac with SPICE and using 6 screens here (11520*2160)."
"The most valuable feature of Proxmox VE is its ease of use."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of deployment."
"The solution's most valuable feature is backups."
"The backup service, which was released recently, and that we are already using, is wonderful."
"It is a community-based solution."
"Saves a lot of time compared to imaging physical desktops."
"The solution is not flexible."
"I find the solution to be incredibly unstable, constantly falling over and not working properly."
"The communications setup lags. It does not connect properly so the batching and networking is a bit slow."
"The solution is a bit less stable than I would like."
"The solution should work to simplify the system. However, it should be flexible enough to allow for special cases."
"When I select the Ubuntu operating system from within the virtual machine, it sometimes hangs."
"Basically, the GUI and command-line interface need improvement."
"The installation is difficult and could be improved."
"This solution needs a more flexible and efficient backup solution in the dashboard."
"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 solution needs to move to the cloud. It would be nice if they made it more robust there."
"The initial setup has a pretty steep learning curve."
"It's one of those things for me to move things on to the cloud. It's not so easy. I am always on the laptop and have to monitor that because if you want to make strides; you need to stay online."
"The documentation in Proxmox VE could improve."
"We find it difficult to find the root cause of the issues."
"The virtualization can be better."
Oracle VM VirtualBox is ranked 5th in Server Virtualization Software with 61 reviews while Proxmox VE is ranked 1st in Server Virtualization Software with 58 reviews. Oracle VM VirtualBox is rated 8.2, while Proxmox VE is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Oracle VM VirtualBox writes "The solution is versatile, simple to use, and stable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Proxmox VE writes "Easy to use and supports multi-monitors on multiple VMs in KVM". Oracle VM VirtualBox is most compared with KVM, Hyper-V, Oracle VM, VMware Workstation and VMware vSphere, whereas Proxmox VE is most compared with VMware vSphere, KVM, Nutanix AHV Virtualization, Hyper-V 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.