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.
"Very cost-effective."
"Good screen and keyboard sharing feature."
"The product's scalability is good...It's a very stable product."
"If you are a Linux desktop user, KVM is the solution to go with if you have to start virtual machines with Linux or other operating systems with almost zero extra configuration needed."
"It is easy to use, stable, and flexible. It is a pretty mature product, and it is faster than VirtualBox."
"There is a strong emphasis on availability, and they have numerous API interfaces for distributed storage and the solution is quite known for its openness."
"The most valuable feature is hypervisor. I can host at the same time different operating systems in Linux Windows."
"The product is really good...One can get good performance because of kernel-based virtualization."
"The good thing is that it is multi-platform. Once you create a virtual machine in one particular environment, you can switch over to see if you can run it in other environments. For example, if you are on Windows and you create this virtual machine, you can actually go ahead and change the operating system. You can switch it over to Linux or Mac OS and see if you can run the VirtualBox on those particular machines. It even runs on some of the commercial operating systems that are not mainstream, such as Solaris and BSD. These kinds of operating systems are also supported by VirtualBox. The other thing that is good about VirtualBox is that it is open source. So, if you need to do any modifications for your own purposes, you can just download the source, modify it, and deploy it in your environment. It is pretty good and very versatile. You can create and manipulate virtual machines from the command line, which is also very important. It's something that some other products on the desktop side do not have. VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop don't have a good command-line interface to create and manipulate virtual machines, whereas VirtualBox has it out of the box, which is pretty good."
"This solution creates a snapshot of virtual machines so you can create test environments."
"The versatility, simplicity, and stability of the product are it's most valuable features."
"The product’s most valuable feature is the ability to manage multiple operating systems through one application."
"Oracle VM VirtualBox has a platform where the support team responds to frequently asked questions by its users. Every time I have had issues with Oracle VM VirtualBox, I always get a solution from Oracle's online platform or GitHub."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to copy bidirectionally between the desktop and the virtual machine."
"It's a pretty good product in terms of monitoring."
"Oracle VM VirtualBox is easy to use."
"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."
"I have encountered difficulties in getting the tool's documentation."
"We are not getting good support from KVM, and it is not that user-friendly."
"Support for VF is needed, where you can, for example, export from VMware to KVM."
"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."
"In KVM, snapshots and cloning are areas where there could be a little more sophistication, like VMware."
"The KVM tech support is really bad. They are not very responsive."
"KVM is very difficult to manage and run on daily operations."
"The technical support needs to improve."
"The solution has to do a better job of promoting the product and its licensing capabilities."
"The user interface needs to be improved."
"The solution is not flexible."
"Oracle VM VirtualBox doesn't work properly with an antivirus tool."
"When I select the Ubuntu operating system from within the virtual machine, it sometimes hangs."
"Having live migrations to move a running server to other hardware would be great."
"One valuable feature would be for it to work right the first time but it doesn't necessarily do that."
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.