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.
"It is easy to use, stable, and flexible. It is a pretty mature product, and it is faster than VirtualBox."
"The key aspect is that the KVM directly interacts with the Kronos. There's no clear indication of indirect communication with Kronos. It is not linked to Kronos, and interaction is straightforward without any intermediaries."
"The performance is great."
"I like that it's easy to manage. It's also more powerful when it comes to security than others. That point of view is the one consideration. The other consideration is that it's cost-effective."
"I like that this is an open-source solution. It is very powerful, and it's easy."
"It is an easily scalable solution."
"Good screen and keyboard sharing feature."
"A very reliable solution which can be used for x86 architecture virtualization with reasonable overhead."
"It is a stable product."
"This is a good and easy solution for running virtual environments."
"The solution is very convenient and easy to use."
"The solution is very stable."
"The product’s most valuable feature is the ability to manage multiple operating systems through one application."
"I like that it has a snapshot feature."
"The cloning is a very useful tool."
"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."
"The speed is around thirty percent slower than another competitor. This would be something to work on."
"The stability of this solution is less than other products in the same category."
"One problem I have is that it's not very scalable when it comes to resizing the VM disk dimensions. For example, if you have initially set a virtual drive to 10 GB and you want to upgrade it to 15 GB, it's not that easy."
"The main drawback in the solution is probably disaster recovery."
"One thing that maybe could be improved is making it easier to scale. It needs to be more clear on how to scale the storage space for virtual machines."
"There are some issues with the graphics and some software that is very complex."
"The grid interface of KVM needs improvement. It could be more beautiful, especially when compared to VMware."
"In KVM, snapshots and cloning are areas where there could be a little more sophistication, like VMware."
"The solution is a bit less stable than I would like."
"The solution could be more user-friendly."
"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."
"The AI and the UI could be improved. The user interface is a little outdated and the AI is not very attractive."
"Having live migrations to move a running server to other hardware would be great."
"Basically, the GUI and command-line interface need improvement."
"It's not as robust as server platforms, nor does it need to be."
"The technical support needs to improve."
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.