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.
"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."
"Very cost-effective."
"I like that this is an open-source solution. It is very powerful, and it's easy."
"I have found KVM to be scalable."
"The initial setup was very easy."
"The most valuable feature is hypervisor. I can host at the same time different operating systems in Linux Windows."
"I think nine out of the ten supercomputers in the world use Linux KVM, so I think that attests to the fact that it is a scalable product."
"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 product gives us the flexibility to try different machines."
"The scalability of the solution is very good."
"The installation is easy."
"This product is extremely easy to install, use, has a great GUI and is incredibly stable."
"The solution is very stable."
"VirtualBox provides an isolated, consistent environment"
"The most valuable aspects of the solution were the support and performance of the product and the flexibility it gives you to work."
"It's a pretty good product in terms of monitoring."
"The networking with wireless devices needs improvement."
"KVM is very difficult to manage and run on daily operations."
"Support for VF is needed, where you can, for example, export from VMware to KVM."
"Lacks high availability across clusters as well as support for Apache CloudStack."
"Its resource usage can be improved."
"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."
"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."
"In KVM, snapshots and cloning are areas where there could be a little more sophistication, like VMware."
"I find the solution to be incredibly unstable, constantly falling over and not working properly."
"This solution needs improvement with the business continuity planning, disaster and recovery management and using centralized data storage."
"The solution needs to improve its flexibility. It's not as flexible as VMware."
"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."
"Oracle’s support team should improve its response time."
"They could improve the graphics functionality of the product."
"We're working with them to be able to allow the local USB ports to be ported over to the remote desktop, running VirtualBox."
"When I select the Ubuntu operating system from within the virtual machine, it sometimes hangs."
KVM is ranked 4th in Server Virtualization Software with 39 reviews while Oracle VM VirtualBox is ranked 6th in Server Virtualization Software with 62 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.