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.
"One of the best features of KVM is its user-friendly interface."
"The KVM service is well managed with a central policy interface."
"The most valuable feature of KVM is its stability."
"The initial setup was simple."
"KVM is stable."
"This solution is open source and easy to configure."
"Scaling the solution is easy. You just have to add more hardware."
"What I like most about KVM is that it's very easy to use. Everything is built-in, even when writing command lines."
"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."
"The most valuable aspects of the solution were the support and performance of the product and the flexibility it gives you to work."
"It's a pretty good product in terms of monitoring."
"The flexibility as well as performance wise and as well as data volume, we have huge volume stored."
"The snapshot feature is very powerful; it protects us from disaster."
"The versatility, simplicity, and stability of the product are it's most valuable features."
"The solution has high performance and is easy to use."
"The only negative aspect of needing hardware support is a fully functional KVM can be dropped. It would be nice if the support for other platforms, like ARM or Risk, were as good as the x86 one. However, with the democratization of Chromebooks based on these chips and mobile devices, it will not take long for that to happen."
"I would like to see more focus on microservices and integration with Kubernetes or OpenShift."
"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."
"Technical support is not top-notch."
"We are not getting good support from KVM, and it is not that user-friendly."
"The solution should be more user friendly. We are struggling with the command lines."
"KVM is very difficult to manage and run on daily operations."
"Monitoring and resolution could be improved."
"The AI and the UI could be improved. The user interface is a little outdated and the AI is not very attractive."
"The solution lacks some open source remote administration tools. The reload of individual virtual machine definitions through the vboxweb service (via its API) without restarting it and the access to shared storage (to use teleport functions) need to be improved."
"There are a few bugs that need to be updated."
"The technical support needs to improve."
"It's not as robust as server platforms, nor does it need to be."
"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 solution needs to improve its flexibility. It's not as flexible as VMware."
"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 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.