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."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is hypervisor. I can host at the same time different operating systems in Linux Windows."
"The GUI interface makes the management of KVM easier than ever before."
"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."
"I appreciate the network passcode feature in KVM, as it provides a convenient way to manage DNS and cloud hosting."
"The product's scalability is good...It's a very stable product."
"What I like most about KVM is that it's very easy to use. Everything is built-in, even when writing command lines."
"The solution is very convenient and easy to use."
"The versatility, simplicity, and stability of the product are it's most valuable features."
"Technical support is good."
"It is easy to use and does not require complex knowledge."
"The product’s most valuable feature is the ability to manage multiple operating systems through one application."
"The flexibility and the closed platform, so it allows you to run in multiple platforms, Windows, Linux, Macintosh."
"The configuration and installation is pretty straightforward."
"It is a stable product."
"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."
"I believe KVM offers a unified answer, while ProxMark addresses orchestration. KVM lacks orchestration. If the aim is to centrally oversee multiple KVMs – let's say to freeze them – a centralized management solution is absent."
"The grid interface of KVM needs improvement. It could be more beautiful, especially when compared to VMware."
"The speed is around thirty percent slower than another competitor. This would be something to work on."
"I would like to see more focus on microservices and integration with Kubernetes or OpenShift."
"The product must provide better performance monitoring features."
"Lacks high availability across clusters as well as support for Apache CloudStack."
"The main drawback in the solution is probably disaster recovery."
"I find the solution to be incredibly unstable, constantly falling over and not working properly."
"The communications setup lags. It does not connect properly so the batching and networking is a bit slow."
"Basically, the GUI and command-line interface need improvement."
"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 is not flexible."
"Oracle VM VirtualBox doesn't work properly with an antivirus tool."
"The solution needs to improve its flexibility. It's not as flexible as VMware."
"The solution needs to improve the methods used for starting and stopping the machine."
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.