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.
"KVM is stable."
"I have found KVM to be scalable."
"Very cost-effective."
"The KVM service is well managed with a central policy interface."
"Documentation and problem-solving troubleshooting are the most valuable features. Performance (when fine-tuned and with "special" HW) is awesome, equal to or more than other enterprise closed-source solutions."
"The GUI interface makes the management of KVM easier than ever before."
"KVM has a rich options set which can be directly used or via wrappers, such as libvirt."
"I find the density of the product most valuable. It is density that a technologist can just assign page merging. This is what makes KVM one of the important players of the virtualization market."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that there is no cost because it is open source."
"The snapshot feature is very powerful; it protects us from disaster."
"The solution is very stable."
"The initial setup was straightforward."
"I think VirtualBox has good stability because I use it in an environment with several resolutions."
"The versatility, simplicity, and stability of the product are it's most valuable features."
"VirtualBox provides an isolated, consistent environment"
"This is a good and easy solution for running virtual environments."
"I have encountered difficulties in getting the tool's documentation."
"The initial setup of this solution is more difficult than some of the competing products and it could be improved."
"We still occasionally build Interlaced Wireless Protection within our environment. The ecosystem entails areas, where we support agents, and release backup and security solutions. Collaboration with independent software vendors (ITOLs or ITOLED) is necessary to offer these solutions to customers. However, the scope of the ecosystem in KVM is not as extensive as that of VMware's. In contrast, VMware boasts a robust partner network, allowing for comprehensive customer solutions. On the other hand, KVM’s ecosystem is comparatively limited in comparison. I would like to see FT features in KVM."
"The speed is around thirty percent slower than another competitor. This would be something to work on."
"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."
"Its resource usage can be improved."
"The virtual manager and the graphical QEMU for KVM need some improvement."
"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."
"There are a few bugs that need to be updated."
"It could improve slightly with enhanced reporting capabilities that show the current status of the network."
"This solution needs improvement with the business continuity planning, disaster and recovery management and using centralized data storage."
"The communications setup lags. It does not connect properly so the batching and networking is a bit slow."
"When I select the Ubuntu operating system from within the virtual machine, it sometimes hangs."
"The memory and hardware usage could be a little bit lighter. Right now, it's quite heavy on the usage. The CPU usage should be lower."
"The solution is a bit less stable than I would like."
"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."
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.