Summary

• VMware Workstation Pro offers superior performance in setting up and running virtual machines compared to VirtualBox.
• VirtualBox is simpler to set up, has a more intuitive user interface, and supports more virtual disk format options than Workstation Pro.
• While VirtualBox may be easier for beginners, VMware Workstation Pro is the better choice for those seeking high performance in virtualization tasks.

If you aren’t familiar with them, hypervisors are incredible tools that let you run virtual instances of actual operating systems. Whereas the more powerful hypervisors like Proxmox and ESXi have to be installed on top of the bare hardware, their Type-2 counterparts are far more accessible as they can be set up without wiping out your operating system.

Up until a few months ago, VirtualBox was the most popular Type-2 hypervisor in the PC community, as it offered several useful features like encryption and snapshots. But with Broadcom making the VMware Workstation Pro free for personal use, it’s possible to access most, if not all, of these features without resorting to VirtualBox. So, we’ve pitted the two hypervisors against each other to check which one’s better for your virtualization needs.

Pricing

Winner: VirtualBox, though there's a caveat you should be aware of

On paper, both VirtualBox and VMware Workstation Pro let you run virtual machines for free. But things are a bit different once you consider the terms of the Personal license for Workstation Pro. According to VMware, you’re free to use its hypervisor for personal tasks, though you must pay a subscription fee of $120 every year if you plan to utilize it for commercial purposes.

Meanwhile, VirtualBox is an open-source tool licensed under GNU GPL v3, meaning you can leverage the hypervisor in your commercial workloads without paying hefty licensing fees. Of course, there’s still a catch with VirtualBox. If you’re planning to make full use of your VMs, you’ll need to use a set of utilities called the VirtualBox Extensions Pack. But unlike the base version of VirtualBox, the toolkit is only available for free if you use it for your personal projects. As such, you’ll have to pay a minimum of $50 per annum to integrate the Extension Packs into your commercial projects.

Ease of installation

Winner: VirtualBox, easy

Difficulty-wise, VirtualBox is far simpler to set up than VMware Workstation Pro – and that’s mostly because the latter has you complete an unnecessarily long series of steps before letting you grab the setup executable for it. The download link for VirtualBox is available on Oracle's website, and you’re free to download the setup.exe file for the hypervisor without jumping through various hoops.

Meanwhile, VMware requires you to create an account, verify said account, and navigate through a maze of options before finding the download link for Workstation Pro. And even then, you’ll have to accept another agreement before you can grab the setup file.

Virtual Drives format

Winner: VirtualBox

When creating a VM, most hypervisors ask you to allocate some storage space from your physical drive to create a virtual disk. VirtualBox lets you pick between three different virtual disk formats: VirtualBox Disk Image (VDI), Virtual Hard Disk (VHD), and Virtual Machine Disk (VHDK). Technically, the hypervisor also supports some additional formats, namely HDD, QCOW, and QED, though you'll be dealing with the previous three for the most part. For the average user, it's hard to detect the performance between the different options, though VirtualBox definitely earns some brownie points for supporting more formats. Meanwhile, Workstation Pro only supports one drive format, VHDK, though it's possible to convert virtual disks with VDI, VHD, and most other formats to VHDK without too many issues.

User interface

Winner: Draw, but VirtualBox is slightly simpler to use

I initially considered ditching this section from the article, as I find both Workstation Pro and VirtualBox to be fairly easy to use. However, for a complete beginner to the virtualization space, I’m inclined to admit that VirtualBox has a slight edge when it comes to accessibility.

From creating VMs to modifying their settings, VirtualBox’s UI is a little more intuitive than Workstation Pro’s. That’s not to say that the latter is extremely complex. But once you combine the difficulty in setting up Workstation Pro with its icon-less interface, it’s easy to see why VirtualBox is simpler to pick up for beginners.

Supported host OS

Winner: VirtualBox (draw when you include VMware Fusion)

Both VirtualBox and Workstation Pro can be installed on Windows and Linux, though only the former supports macOS. That said, VMware does provide the same licensing terms for Workstation Pro’s sibling, Fusion Pro, which is developed specifically for macOS.

The commercial Hypervisor license also carries over from Workstation Pro to Fusion Pro, meaning you don’t need to pay for a second $120/year subscription when switching from a Windows/Linux host to a macOS one. What’s more, you can seamlessly transfer most VMs from Workstation Pro to Fusion Pro and vice versa!

Performance

Winner: Workstation Pro by a longshot

If you’re looking for a quick way to run lightweight tasks on an OS, you can go with either Workstation Pro or VirtualBox. But for anyone looking to run even remotely demanding workloads on their virtual machines, Workstation Pro is hands down the better option.

Starting with responsiveness, Workstation Pro is miles ahead of its competitor. As someone who has used VirtualBox for years, I found Workstation Pro to provide a snappier experience even when assigning lower resources to the VMs – and that also includes 3D acceleration performance. Sure, they don't support PCI passthrough like their Type-1 rivals, but Workstation Pro lets you use a larger chunk of the video memory and provides decent performance in 3D-accelerated workloads.

To get some practical numbers, I measured the time it takes to properly set up Windows 11 Pro on Workstation Pro and VirtualBox. In each instance (pun intended), I allocated 8 CPUs (or threads, to be more precise) of my Ryzen 5 5600X alongside 24GB of memory. To further elucidate the difference in performance between the two, I chose an internal HDD as the installation location.

Clearly, VMware Workstation Pro is much faster when it comes to setting up VMs. Pair that with the hypervisor's superior performance when running said virtual machines, and it’s easily the victor in this category.

Which hypervisor should you go for?

VirtualBox for beginners, Workstation Pro for everyone else

Although VirtualBox was the winner in most categories, it’s just not as capable as its rival. And since most users interested in virtualization will prefer performance over a slightly easier setup procedure, VMware Workstation Pro is the better hypervisor.

Had I written this article a year ago, when we had the normal Workstation in the free category instead of its Pro sibling, I would have crowned VirtualBox as the victor. The now-defunct version of VMware’s Type-1 hypervisor didn’t support snapshots and encryption, and the former is an especially useful feature for any virtualization tool. But when Broadcom replaced Workstation Player with Workstation Pro earlier this year, VirtualBox lost its major advantage against its rival. But that doesn't mean VirtualBox is unusable: it's just that Workstation Pro has a major edge when it comes to performance, making it the ideal Type-2 hypervisor for any virtual machine enthusiast.