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.
"The tool's most valuable feature is backup. The product makes it easy to manage virtual machines. Other tools require third-party applications like VMware and vSphere. However, KVM doesn't require these applications."
"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."
"What I like most about KVM is that it's very easy to use. Everything is built-in, even when writing command lines."
"It is an easily scalable solution."
"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."
"I like that this is an open-source solution. It is very powerful, and it's easy."
"One of the best features of KVM is its user-friendly interface."
"Scaling the solution is easy. You just have to add more hardware."
"VirtualBox provides an isolated, consistent environment"
"The solution has high performance and is easy to use."
"This is a highly scalable solution."
"The flexibility as well as performance wise and as well as data volume, we have huge volume stored."
"This is a good and easy solution for running virtual environments."
"The product gives us the flexibility to try different machines."
"The product’s most valuable feature is the ability to manage multiple operating systems through one application."
"The installation is easy."
"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."
"The grid interface of KVM needs improvement. It could be more beautiful, especially when compared to VMware."
"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 initial setup of this solution is more difficult than some of the competing products and it could be improved."
"Technical support is not top-notch."
"I would like to see more focus on microservices and integration with Kubernetes or OpenShift."
"Lacks high availability across clusters as well as support for Apache CloudStack."
"The virtual manager and the graphical QEMU for KVM need some improvement."
"The solution is not flexible."
"They could improve the graphics functionality of the product."
"Oracle needs to improve its hot virtual machine migration. It didn't work as intended. It should allow us to migrate between virtual machines, without stopping the database."
"The product lacks scalability since it is for desktops and not for servers."
"The AI and the UI could be improved. The user interface is a little outdated and the AI is not very attractive."
"One valuable feature would be for it to work right the first time but it doesn't necessarily do that."
"It should have the functionality where if I move the mouse away from one screen, the context changes automatically."
"The solution has to do a better job of promoting the product and its licensing capabilities."
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.