Summary

• VMWare Workstation Pro is the best all-arounder for home users for its stellar performance and compatibility.
• Oracle VirtualBox is an excellent alternative.
• Microsoft Hyper-V has the best performance and security, but it's only available on Windows.

Though best known for their use in the enterprise, virtual machines, running on hypervisors, have their place on home PCs, too. Because they can run multiple different operating systems on a single machine, you can use them to run your favorite Linux distribution or set up a new development environment.

Even if you aren’t a power user or developer, setting up a dedicated virtual machine for office work can still be useful for consolidating all your work files and apps while creating a clear boundary between your work and personal life.

Virtual machines are also portable and can be easily moved between devices. As long as the destination device supports the hypervisor, restoring a virtual machine can be done in just a few clicks.

There are tons of hypervisors available for the enterprise, but for personal use, three big names stand out as fantastic options.

Know your type: type 1 and 2 hypervisors

In a nutshell, there are two types of hypervisors: type 1, which runs directly on the hardware without requiring a host operating system, and type 2, which runs on top of an existing operating system. Type 1 hypervisors generally offer better performance and stronger isolation, while type 2 are typically platform-agnostic and easier to install. Understanding this distinction will help clarify the strengths of the following hypervisors.

3 VMWare Workstation Pro

Fast, refined, and easy to use.

VMWare is a well-known brand in enterprise virtualization and hypervisor space. It has made its Workstation Pro hypervisor free for personal use, and there are good reasons why it’s considered the industry standard.

As a Type 2 hypervisor, Workstation Pro runs inside your host operating system like any other software would. It warns you of a potential performance degradation because it clashes with Windows’ own virtualization security settings, but the difference is negligible for most users. All its settings are clearly laid out under intuitive menus, and collects the various virtual machines into tabs, much like a brow. For personal use, there’s no need to fiddle around with other Windows settings to finish customization. It’s very beginner-friendly.

The setup experience is painless. Installing operating systems are exactly the same as installing on any other PC. The display resolution is limited at the initial launch, but it’s quickly remedied by installing VMWare Tools, which contain a bunch of specific drivers for virtualized video adapters and peripherals, to enable full compatibility. It supports both windowed and full-screen modes, and with fullscreen enabled, you can barely notice that you’re working on a virtual machine.

Migrating VMs to another machine also only takes a few clicks. Workstation Pro has a convenient export feature. Users only need to import the exported file onto a new device.

Besides the slight performance penalty, getting Workstation Pro asks for a Broadcom account registration that needs a physical address. You don’t need to be logged into this account to use the software, only to download it.

2 Oracle VirtualBox

A robust open-source alternative to VMWare Workstation Pro.

Oracle is another big name in cloud and database management applications. It picked up VirtualBox as a part of its Sun Microsystems acquisition. Open-source and free for personal use, VirtualBox is a feature-rich cross-platform hypervisor.

VirtualBox is a type-2 hypervisor. Once upon a time, it didn't play nice alongside Hyper-V, especially when it came to creating Windows VMs. Ever since VirtualBox version 6 added support for the Hyper-V API back in 2020, its compatibility has improved significantly. Today, Virtualbox had no problem running a Windows 11 VM when I had Hyper-V turned on.

I love the way VirtualBox looks: clear labels, big buttons, and colorful thumbnails mean I can quickly find the settings I’m looking for. The home page only has three dropdown menus, keeping it clear of cluttered.

Installing Ubuntu was a breeze, but Windows gave me a little trouble. I ran into an issue with my Windows installation stalling at a black screen, but a few restarts out of frustration seemed to resolve it. On a positive note, VirtualBox supports unattended installation that handles the account setup in Windows automatically to save time. Like Workstation Pro, VirtualBox also offers the Guest Additions package to enhance the virtual machine’s performance and compatibility, and it can be installed directly in the VM.

Using VirtualBox is very pleasant. It doesn’t feel slow at all in my daily workloads, although I have to say that given the same amount of resources (two virtual CPUs and 4GB of memory), it’s just a tad less responsive than Workstation Pro.

As with the other hypervisors on this list, VMWare also lets you easily export and import a VM to other devices.

1 Microsoft Hyper-V

The best performance, but only available on Windows.

Microsoft Hyper-V is included in Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise. There’s nothing to download — just enable the feature (along with the Windows Virtual Machine Platform), restart your device, and voilà, it’s ready for action.

As a Microsoft feature running inside Windows, it’s unsurprising that Hyper-V is a Type-1 hypervisor with direct access to the hardware. This means better performance, security, and system isolation than Workstation Pro and Oracle VirtualBox. It also supports all of Windows’ virtualization security features without any performance hits. Plus, enabling Hyper-V gives you access to Windows Sandbox, a temporary, isolated environment for testing questionable apps. However, since Hyper-V is a first-party Microsoft feature, it isn’t available on anything except Windows. If you’re using VMs on a Linux or Mac device, you’re out of luck.

To create and customize virtual machines, you’ll need to access the Hyper-V Manager, which sports an interface that echoes the austerity of Microsoft’s enterprise products — uninspiring yet brutally efficient. Although I’m not a fan of how it looks, it does organize all the settings in a clear and intuitive structure, making them easy to find.

Installing Windows 11 in a Hyper-V VM was painless. However, I ran into the “Start PXE over IPv4” message when trying to install Ubuntu with Secure Boot enabled. That was quickly rectified but required a bit of Googling to find the source of the issue.

As you’d expect, Hyper-V handles Windows 11 perfectly. And with Enhanced Session enabled, its performance is nearly identical to the host machine’s in all my work apps. That said, it gave me a harder time when I tried to set up Ubuntu. Both the refresh rate and resolution were locked at an unusable baseline by default. And unlike Workstation Pro and VirtualBox, which offer a package that expanded compatibility, I had to add “hyperv_fb” (a framebuffer feature) to Ubuntu’s blacklist config file and manually set the maximum resolution in PowerShell. It worked fine once it was up and running; it was just more cumbersome to get there.

Hyper-V offers several easy ways to move its VMs to another machine, but my favorite method is still just exporting and restoring. Alternatively, you can copy the VHDX file onto the new device and set it up as a new VM, perform a live migration, or even convert the VHDX file for use in another hypervisor.

One stands on top, but each is unique

All three options have their distinct advantages and drawbacks, but VMware Workstation Pro is the best overall hypervisor for most users. It has fantastic performance, broad operating system compatibility, and is cross-platform. Oracle VirtualBox is an excellent alternative, but its performance seems to trail Workstation Pro ever so slightly. Finally, while Microsoft Hyper-V delivers the best performance and security, it’s only available on Windows and requires extra steps to get Linux working properly.

Regardless of which hypervisor you choose, remember that VMs are resource hogs, so be sure to grab the best processor and as much memory as you can, especially if you plan to run more than one VM concurrently.