Citrix Hypervisor vs Hyper-V comparison

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10,819 views|7,590 comparisons
80% willing to recommend
Microsoft Logo
41,921 views|34,526 comparisons
85% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 13, 2022

We performed a comparison between Citrix Hypervisor and Hyper-V based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Ease of Deployment: Reviewers of both solutions report that the initial setup and deployment is straightforward and fast.

  • Features: Users of both products are happy with their stability and scalability.

    Citrix Hypervisor users say that it is secure and flexible with good customizations, and can easily move VMs between hosts. Several users mention that its backup tools could use improvement.

    Hyper-V users report that it integrates well with other Microsoft products and is user-friendly but utilizes a high amount of memory and resources.
  • Pricing: Users of both solutions say that they are low-cost products.
  • Service and Support: Reviewers of both solutions report being satisfied with the level of the support they receive.

  • ROI: Both Citrix Hypervisor and Hyper-V users are satisfied with the ROI.

Comparison Results: Citrix Hypervisor comes out on top in this comparison. According to reviews, it appears to be a more secure and lightweight solution than Hyper-V.

To learn more, read our detailed Citrix Hypervisor vs. Hyper-V Report (Updated: March 2024).
768,857 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The solution is extremely user friendly.""The compatibility of the solution is its most valuable feature. It's compatible on almost every cloud these days.""The solution is extremely stable.""We can easily migrate VMs from one host to another.""The continued uptime of our virtual machines is good.""The price is the solution's most valuable feature.""What I find most valuable in Citrix Hypervisor is its licensing policy, because you'll get it for free if you buy a Citrix XenDesktop license. You don't need to spend additional money on the Citrix Hypervisor because you can manage both the Citrix XenDesktop and the Citrix Hypervisor with just one license, so you can save on cost. I also like that the solution is good support-wise. Hardware support is also faster compared to other solutions.""What I like the most is the support of the GPU Graphics and the VM Live migration."

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"Hyper-V deployment is very user-friendly. It supports partial scripting and offers a UI for a smooth experience. There's also PowerShell scripting available for advanced users.""The most valuable feature is that it's an end-to-end solution.""The implementation process is simple.""The solution is very powerful, easy to use, user-friendly, and integrates well with Windows. If you are looking for a hundred percent Microsoft environment it would be a good idea to go with Hyper-V. They work wonderfully together.""The solution is highly scalable.""The most valuable feature of Hyper-V is the replica service.""The simplicity and intuitiveness of the platform. It was a very simple adaptation, if you have any experience in virtualization.""Microsoft's a good name for legacy support and solutions"

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Cons
"I think the technical support could be better.""The licensing costs are too high on the solution. They should work to make the costs more reasonable.""It needs improvement with the security features.""Live migration is something that can be improved.""Citrix could provide more tools to help the client manage the solution because we need to build our own tools in some cases. Everything is available through PowerShell, but then you need to build your own scripts to do the more advanced work.""The solution is only in English. It would be ideal if it was in Portuguese.""There are several areas that need improvement including the stability of the networking stack and networking management.""We'd like them to add more automation to the product."

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"It needs to improve the handling of the amount of storage.""I would love to see other options for connecting VMs to large data storage.""It would be nice if it was turned into its own product because that's the problem with it. It doesn't have a single place where you can manage things. You have to go into all different screens to be able to configure it. And then you have no idea what the performance is. It's really just a feature added to Windows, and Microsoft does not really have anything that pulls it all together well. Compared to VMware, it does not have everything collaborate on one screen.""It might make it easier to move VMs across Hotmail hosts. This application process make it a little bit easier.""The backup site could be better. We used to face a lot of issues, and we are looking to solve that now. We are in the process of moving all the infrastructure to the cloud. It could also use more integration on the management part. We also need more integration on the monitoring sites.""They can hot add NICs to the VMs. However, there is still not the ability to hot add virtual processors to running VMs.""It's not completely stable because your stack becomes bloated.""Security, computing balance, and taking snapshots could be improved. Features like DRS and memory ballooning could be added."

More Hyper-V Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The pricing and licensing is so important. Customers do consider the price seriously."
  • "The most valuable feature is the cost; it is a free product."
  • "To subscribe to the paid version with support, it is approximately $6,000 per year."
  • "There are free and paid versions. The free version is limited in features but not by time limit. The paid version has more features."
  • "While it is free for small networks, the pricing is high if your network grows past a certain size."
  • "We migrated from VMware to XenCenter to cut costs."
  • "This solution is open source, it's free."
  • "Citrix is a good low-cost alternative to VMware, so if budgeting is an issue then I would recommend it."
  • More Citrix Hypervisor Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "It's cheap, but not the best."
  • "Once we bought the datacenter version of the server, we did away with worrying about the cost of licensing our VMs separately"
  • "It comes with all the features and goodies inside the box, so you do not have to purchase anything else."
  • "We did not have to pay extra money for the Failover Clustering feature."
  • "We chose this solution because of the pricing and the simplicity of the product."
  • "I do not have any comments about pricing or licensing of the product."
  • "Microsoft recently tacked on a higher price for their software to use the storage migration in the Storage Spaces Direct array. That was just terrible."
  • "The pricing isn't too bad, because you can do the bare metal hypervisor, and it is pretty fair. Other competitors are more expensive."
  • More Hyper-V Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Comparison Review
    Thang Le Toan (Victory Lee)
    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Citrix Hypervisor is expensive. The cloud licenses are expensive. Only Citrix is earning money off those. It's the same with VMware and Microsoft.
    Top Answer:Citrix is not investing in the virtual surroundings. Third-party tools are bad for Citrix at the moment. No good backup recovery is available. On Microsoft, we can use Veeam, which is a great product… more »
    Top Answer:KVM is better. But let's just look at the software instead of judging Hyper-V was a free solution from Microsoft to virtualize Server or Client OS as it is a feature on Windows Server since 2008 and… more »
    Top Answer:One of the best things about Proxmox VE is that it is open-source and very inexpensive. You get all of the same features as with the more well-known products. Proxmox VE is very easy to deploy - it… more »
    Top Answer:Hyper-V helps to make a replica server between two machines. It is very easy to learn.
    Ranking
    Views
    10,819
    Comparisons
    7,590
    Reviews
    8
    Average Words per Review
    580
    Rating
    8.8
    Views
    41,921
    Comparisons
    34,526
    Reviews
    29
    Average Words per Review
    399
    Rating
    7.7
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    XenServer
    Learn More
    Overview

    Citrix Hypervisor is a leading virtualization management platform optimized for application, desktop and server virtualization infrastructures. Consolidation and containment of workloads on Citrix Hypervisor enables organizations of any vertical or size to transform their business IT compute infrastructures.

    Hyper-V is a hardware virtualization tool that allows users to create virtual computer environments with multiple operating systems on a single physical server. Each virtual machine has computer parts, such as memory, processor, storage, and networking, and acts like a standard computer - running its own operating system and software programs. Each component of the virtual machine can be configured to meet your specific requirements.

    Hyper-V creates a cost-effective, stable, and productive server virtualization environment by running multiple operating systems, such as Windows, Linux, and more, in parallel on one machine or server. Each virtual machine runs in its own isolated space, which means you can run many virtual machines simultaneously but independently of each other. This helps prevent problems such as a crash affecting the other workloads and enables different users to separately access various systems.

    Benefits of Hyper-V

    • Simplify application testing: With Hyper-V you can easily add and remove operating systems from your virtual machines, enabling you to run and test your applications on each of them all from one single computer.

    • Minimize resource usage and scalability: Virtual machines are easier to manage than physical hardware and less expensive. You can also maximize your server use by allocating its resources more efficiently than you can with physical hardware alone.

    Hyper-V key features:.

    • Replication and migration: Hyper-V can replicate virtual machines for backups onto different sites. Hyper-V also provides a migration tool for moving a virtual machine from one Hyper-V host to another without causing any downtime.

    • Remote connection: Hyper-V’s remote connectivity tool allows administrators to remotely access a virtual machine.

    • Security: Hyper-V keeps virtual machines secure from malware attacks, unauthorized access, and data breaching attempts.

     Reviews from Real Users

    Hyper-V stands out among its competitors for a number of reasons. Several major ones are its flexibility, its replication capabilities, and the fact that its virtual machines utilize a small amount of resources..

    Liam L., the owner of a tech services company, writes, “It is actually very low on resources. It doesn't use many resources. It is also very easy to tailor. You can change things like the amount of memory and storage on the fly. It is very stable and reliable. I like its replication feature, which is very good. It is also very easy to move the virtual machines across push servers without any difficulty. Its performance is also very good. Now with this pandemic, a lot of workers are working from home. A lot of workers have been using laptops as their desktop computers, and they would remote into a virtual PC. There is no difficulty, and they can't tell the difference between this and the real one. It is much easier to manage.”

    Kevin E. an IT director at Homeland Technology Group, LLC, notes, “We've probably seen a 50 percent speed increase on our SQL server. Hyper-V has also significantly reduced our downtimes with faster boot-up and reboot. If we have to reboot a server, there is maybe two or three minutes of downtime. When we were on a bare-metal server, it could be five to ten minutes due to the total boot time.”

    Sample Customers
    U.S. Army Shared Services Center, SoftLayer, Educational Services of America, Independent Bank, and SK Telecom.
    Large customer base from all industries, all over the world. Two major Hyper-V customers are Telefonica and EmpireCLS.
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider17%
    Healthcare Company10%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Computer Software Company7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization48%
    Computer Software Company8%
    Comms Service Provider6%
    Government5%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm14%
    Computer Software Company10%
    Outsourcing Company8%
    Energy/Utilities Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization30%
    Computer Software Company11%
    Comms Service Provider7%
    Government7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business55%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise30%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business16%
    Midsize Enterprise55%
    Large Enterprise30%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business47%
    Midsize Enterprise24%
    Large Enterprise28%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business20%
    Midsize Enterprise37%
    Large Enterprise42%
    Buyer's Guide
    Citrix Hypervisor vs. Hyper-V
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Citrix Hypervisor vs. Hyper-V and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    768,857 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Citrix Hypervisor is ranked 8th in Server Virtualization Software with 45 reviews while Hyper-V is ranked 3rd in Server Virtualization Software with 134 reviews. Citrix Hypervisor is rated 8.2, while Hyper-V is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Citrix Hypervisor writes "Good features, fair pricing, and excellent reliability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Hyper-V writes "It's a low-cost solution that enabled us to shrink everything down into a single server ". Citrix Hypervisor is most compared with Proxmox VE, VMware vSphere, KVM, Oracle VM VirtualBox and Nutanix AHV Virtualization, whereas Hyper-V is most compared with VMware vSphere, VMware Workstation, Proxmox VE, Oracle VM VirtualBox and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI). See our Citrix Hypervisor vs. Hyper-V 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.