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.
"I like that this is an open-source solution. It is very powerful, and it's easy."
"Scaling the solution is easy. You just have to add more hardware."
"The KVM service is well managed with a central policy interface."
"I appreciate the network passcode feature in KVM, as it provides a convenient way to manage DNS and cloud hosting."
"A very reliable solution which can be used for x86 architecture virtualization with reasonable overhead."
"The initial setup was simple."
"The product is really good...One can get good performance because of kernel-based virtualization."
"One of the best features of KVM is its user-friendly interface."
"The solution is very stable."
"The most valuable aspects of the solution were the support and performance of the product and the flexibility it gives you to work."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"I like that it is free and runs on Linux/Ubuntu - I wouldn't use any other solution. I am able to perform small developing tests."
"This is a highly scalable solution."
"I think VirtualBox has good stability because I use it in an environment with several resolutions."
"It's a pretty good product in terms of monitoring."
"The solution is very convenient and easy to use."
"I have encountered difficulties in getting the tool's documentation."
"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."
"The solution’s user interface could be improved and made more user-friendly."
"In our setup, we do not have any dashboards or orchestration, and it is hard to manage. We have 25 gig network cards, but the software driver we have only supported 10 gigs."
"The networking with wireless devices needs improvement."
"In KVM, snapshots and cloning are areas where there could be a little more sophistication, like VMware."
"Lacks high availability across clusters as well as support for Apache CloudStack."
"I think that this solution should be more user-friendly."
"Oracle’s support team should improve its response time."
"The product lacks scalability since it is for desktops and not for servers."
"We're working with them to be able to allow the local USB ports to be ported over to the remote desktop, running VirtualBox."
"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."
"I find the solution to be incredibly unstable, constantly falling over and not working properly."
"The technical support needs to improve."
"We're working with them to be able to allow the local USB ports to be ported over to the remote desktop, running VirtualBox."
KVM is ranked 4th in Server Virtualization Software with 38 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.