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.
"Our production servers are running in Linux, and this solution supports that environment well."
"It is easy to use, stable, and flexible. It is a pretty mature product, and it is faster than VirtualBox."
"KVM has a rich options set which can be directly used or via wrappers, such as libvirt."
"The most valuable feature of KVM is its stability."
"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."
"It is an easily scalable solution."
"I like that this is an open-source solution. It is very powerful, and it's easy."
"The flexibility and the closed platform, so it allows you to run in multiple platforms, Windows, Linux, Macintosh."
"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."
"The flexibility and the closed platform, so it allows you to run in multiple platforms, Windows, Linux, Macintosh."
"I like that it has a snapshot feature."
"This solution can be used on many different platforms including Windows and Linux."
"I like that Oracle VM is safe and stable. It is also very easy to administer. For example, opening a VM or adding a host adapter is extremely easy."
"VirtualBox provides an isolated, consistent environment"
"The solution's most valuable feature is its stability."
"The KVM tech support is really bad. They are not very responsive."
"The initial setup of this solution is more difficult than some of the competing products and it could be improved."
"The solution’s user interface could be improved and made more user-friendly."
"The main drawback in the solution is probably disaster recovery."
"We would like to have a software lifecycle solution included in this solution. We can handle the software needed for KVM, but also the software that we provide. A lifecycle component would be very beneficial."
"I have encountered difficulties in getting the tool's documentation."
"Business continuity features need to be added."
"Its resource usage can be improved."
"This solution needs improvement with the business continuity planning, disaster and recovery management and using centralized data storage."
"The solution has to do a better job of promoting the product and its licensing capabilities."
"This should have better support for multiple network cards and some parts of the GUI should be improved."
"When I select the Ubuntu operating system from within the virtual machine, it sometimes hangs."
"The user interface needs to be improved."
"The solution needs to improve the methods used for starting and stopping the machine."
"The product lacks scalability since it is for desktops and not for servers."
"It's not as robust as server platforms, nor does it need to be."
KVM is ranked 4th in Server Virtualization Software with 38 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.