Parallels® Desktop for Mac is used to run Windows on Intel or Apple silicon. Users can switch between Mac and Windows applications, while retaining the macOS appearance, or use the familiar Windows desktop aesthetic.
$99.99
per year
VMware Workstation Pro
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
VMware Workstation Pro is virtualization software which allows running multiple x86-based operating systems on one PC. Users can run Windows, Linux and BSD virtual machines on a Windows or Linux desktop.
I switched to VMware Workstation Pro, after using Hyper-V for several years. The thing I missed in Hyper-V was the network management which has too less configuration options compared to VMware Workstation Pro. Also managing the snapshots was more user-friendly in VMware …
VMware Workstation Player and Pro are now free for Small Businesses, but Pro used to be paid and quite expensive. There are compatibility issues between those products and Windows hosts, giving that Microsoft has their own hypervisor platform already. Also, if you use Linux, …
I used VMware vSphere at another company. However, for infrastructure with only two virtual machines, the VMware license cost is not worth it, because with the Windows Server Standard license you have the possibility to install two virtual servers at no extra cost.
Verified User
Consultant
Chose Hyper-V
Hyper-V is powerful and virtualizes Windows exceptionally well, with less tweaking. It is also cheaper, and allows our clients to budget more for more frequent expansion. Its only real competitor in my opinion is VMware, and that is because vCenter is much more intuitive than …
Hyper-V comes with Windows Server. It works well, is easy to use and administer, and does everything we need. I see no reason to purchase additional products to do what Hyper-V already does. Plus, the option to eventually use Azure without much fuss makes it a simple choice for …
On a Mac I have used both Parallels and VMware Fusion - both of which I like a lot, but they are Mac specific (and Hyper-V won't work on a Mac either). I have briefly used VMware Workstation on a PC, and found it very easy to use, but I do not believe it is nearly as feature …
Hyper-V is all around well-suited tool for almost any scenario when if you compare it with their respective competitors. It can be used for a single machine for testing purposes only, it can be applied for large-scale networks, either virtual or existing ones. Great set of …
We're a Microsoft Gold Partner and build solutions based on Windows Server. So it was for us internally not a real option to use another virtualization technology as Hyper-V to host our internal infrastructure. As most of our internal infrastructure servers are based on …
Hyper-V being 'free' was the main reason we went for it here. We gave VMware Workstation/Server a try when initially evaluating virtualisation options, but Hyper-V won out for ease of integration into our existing environment. VirtualBox was more of a 'plug in' solution which …
Parallels Desktop has better experience for MacOS if we compare to VMware Workstation Pro. It has more extensions and feature that working great on MacOS environment. Support working multi virtual machines on the same time and no limit (if you have a powerful laptop) I am …
VMware Workstation Player, although free, doesn't meet our needs, and Hyper-V had too many problems when we tried it out. We need the ability to run multiple VM's at the same time, which VMware Workstation Player doesn't support. When testing out Hyper-V, we didn't get very …
They are practically identical. It's only better if you already have virtual machines deployed in Workstation Pro and you do not want to move or have not need to move them quick to Microsoft Hyper-V.
VMware Workstation is ideal for small infrastructures and businesses, particularly for small-scale tasks, whereas VMware ESXi is well-suited for large production environments, multiple servers, and data centers.
The best and easy to adjust all the functions for easy production of the appropriate and quality services via the Cloud and the deployment of the product can easily be done with all users even those with little basic knowledge on VMware Workstation Pro similar platforms. With …
This version of the HyperVisor is similar to other systems, but like most, it has its own twist on things and how it works. One of the essential functions is the tabbed approach to listing VM's which allows multiple servers to be running and allowing access to each using …
VMware Workstation is among the pioneers of virtual machines, every option and every feature is well thought out and implemented, there is no image that it cannot run. It doesn't require that much setup, unlike similar software.
Hyper-V makes a lot of sense in scenarios that will support several Windows Server-based OS virtual machines. The only limitation of those licensed VMs is the hardware that hosts the Hyper-V role. If you need to deploy many servers running Windows Server OS, it is worth the price. Hyper-V also does a great job of managing the server host's computational resources, including memory, CPU, network, and storage.
Parallels is great for an end user that is primarily a macOS user, but occasionally needs Windows access to a specific application or service that is Windows only, or Windows primarily. It obviates the need for multiple desktop units or remote VMs where spin up time is an issue. It is not quite perfect due to the ARM version of Windows requirement, but that particular case is common to all ARM use of Windows.
I would not recommend using a VM as a complete replacement for your everyday driver, but I would recommend it for testing. One way that I use Workstation Pro is with testing GPO's. I can make a change to a user or computer GPO, take a snapshot, reboot the computer to pull the GPO, see if it worked. If it didn't, I revert to the last snapshot before the GPO was pulled, make some changes to the GPO again, and test on the test VM. The same style of testing can be used with creating and changing scripts for computer changes. We have a whole computer setup script that installs software and changes a ton of settings. On a VM you can test over and over to make sure the script runs how you want it to and revert if you didn't like the script outcome. Especially handy with software installs, so you don't have to wait for a program to uninstall and then edit the script and run the script again. Using snapshots save me so much time in testing!
Easy to use GUI - very easy for someone with sufficient Windows experience - not necessarily a system administrator.
Provisioning VMs with different OSes - we mostly rely on different flavors of Windows Server, but having a few *nix distributions was not that difficult.
Managing virtual networks - we usually have 1 or 2 VLANs for our business purposes, but we are happy with the outcomes.
It provides a great remote access tool for accessing and managing servers in virtual environment. With the security risks surround remote desktop this provides a good alternative to do the same functions.
The app itself is very lightweight and easy to install/maintain.
Sandbox testing can be a time consuming thing to setup and do. Workstation makes this easy to create, use, and put away. This make you more willing to put new things in the sandbox and test them before production usage.
The cost of workstation is very affordable for the functionality that you get and you can try it for free before you buy it.
We use it to run apps that can be difficult to setup or conflict with other apps. We just spin this app VM up run it, and then shut it back down. The startup and shutdown is very quick.
We manage Hyper-V using both System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) and the in-build Hyper-V administration tool, the former being the main product we use as the built-in tool is very light on functionality, unlike VMware ESXi.
Management of storage is not great and quite a shift away from how VMware does it with ESXi; there is no separate panel/blade/window for LUNs/data stores, which means there is a lot of back and forth when trying to manage storage.
A dedicated client with all functionality in one place would be awesome.
Having the equivalent of ESXi's virtual console is something which is absolutely needed.
Cheap and easy is the name of the game. It has great support, it doesn't require additional licenses, it works the same if it is a cluster or stand-alone, and all the servers can be centrally managed from a system center virtual machine manager server, even when located at remote sites.
Users are familiar with the application which will keep us going for a little while. However since we are seeing a decline for a need for the software, I wouldn't be surprised to find that this answer changes dramatically in the near future. We would probably keep it to some extent, but we would probably reduce our licensing count.
It is quite intuitive. Junior techs are able to provision and administrate Hyper-V virtual server infrastructure with little to no additional training. Documentation from Microsoft is easily avaliable and decently well written. Hyper-V is reliable and does what it is supposed to. Can be admin from an intuitive gui, or aoutmated with extensive powershell.
It has a good integration, including the connection of peripherals. Taking files back and forth works well and I can attach my Home drive as a network drive in Windows. There is even integration with iCloud and other macOS services. There are also a few different display modes which are useful and fleixible (coherence, windowed, full-screen with multiple screens)
It is well documented since it is a long actor in the virtualization scene. Easy to use for most user cases. Pretty much not maintenance on the software besides the occasional software updates and/or compatibility issues from time to time.
In the past 2 years our Hyper-V servers have only had a handful of instances where the VM's on them were unreachable and the physical Hyper-V server had to be restarted. One time this was due to a RAM issue with the physical box and was resolved when we stopped using dynamic memory in Hyper-V. The other times were after updates were installed and the physical box was not restarted after the updates were installed.
Hyper-V itself works quickly and rarely gave performance issues but this can be more attributed to the physical server specifications that the actual Hyper-V software in my opinion as Hyper-V technically just utilizes config files such as xml, and a data drive file (VHD, VHDX, etc) to perform its' duties.
I gave it a middle of the road rating - as far as getting direct help from Microsoft this never seems to happen. (Good luck getting ahold of them.) Getting help from online support forums is pretty much where I get all my help from. Hyper-V is used quite widely and anything you could need help with is out there and easily searched for on your favorite search engine.
The Parallels documentation and support websites are great. I have not had much use for them, but a cursory check shows richly documented features aimed at both the layperson and the power user or software developer. Their website is well-designed and information is easy to find, and their list of known issues as well as bugfixes on point releases is clear and transparent. They aren't trying to hide any of the limitations of their software, and seem to be regularly updating it to fix new bugs that arise with Mac OS X updates.
I haven't had to call VMware Workstation support. The majority of the time, whenever I have a problem, I can perform an online search and find the answers I need. Online forums and users with similar situations are generally sufficient to answer any questions I have had, though, from previous experience at another company, their support is outstanding and responsive to circumstances. However, that is generally for a paid support contract and should be expected when you are paying for that support.
We had in person training from a third party and while it was very in depth it was at a beginner's level and by the time we received the training we had advanced past this level so it was monotonous and redundant at that point. It was good training though and would have provided a solid foundation for learning the rest of Hyper-V had I had it from the beginning.
The training was easy to read and find. There were good examples in the training and it is plentiful if you use third party resources also. It is not perfect as sometimes you may have a specific question and have to spend time learning or in the rare case you get an error you might have to research that error code which could have multiple causes.
initial configuration of hyper-v is intuitive to anyone familiar with windows and roles for basic items like single server deployments, storage and basic networking. the majority of the problems were with implementing advanced features like high availability and more complex networking. There is a lot of documentation on how to do it but it is not seamless, even to experienced virtualization professionals.
VMware is the pioneer of virtualization but when you compare it with Hyper-V, VMware lacks the flexibility of hardware customization and configuration options Hyper-V has also GPU virtualization still not adequate for both platforms. VMware has better graphical interface and control options for virtual machines. Another advantage VMware has is it does not need a dedicated os GUI base installation only needs small resources and can easily install on any host.
Main two features that made the balance decission go to the Parallels Desktop were the possibility to pause the Windows partition easily (allowing to consume less resources in Mac and save battery) and the other one is the user interface feature called "Coherence" with allows you to show the Windows application windows as if they were native to the macOS, allowing for a better user experience.
VMware ESXi is more enterprise based whereas VMware Workstation offers capabilities at a lower cost and smaller scale. VMware Workstation Pro is also user friendly and easy to install. It can be utilized on a regular desktop system as the name implies. It helps with also demonstrations when needed to clients without having bulky hardware every time.
Nothing is perfect but Hyper-V does a great job of showing the necessary data to users to ensure that there is enough resources to perform essential functions. You can also select what fields show on the management console which is helpful for a quick glance. There are notifications that can be set up and if things go unnoticed and a Hyper-V server runs out of a resource it will safely and quickly shut down the VM's it needs to in order to ensure no Hardware failure or unnecessary data loss.
Massively positive impact on expenses in my company by reducing our storage needs drastically. We were able to reallocate the budget to upgrading our primary Hyper-V server with pure enterprise SSD's as we reduced the storage needs by over 50% and by this we increased performance by over 400%.
We have deployed more than 8 servers with EXTREMELY minimal cost using Hyper-V and not requiring another hardware server to host it. We have leveraged our hardware resources in our 2 servers so well that we were able to add many new services, not in place prior, as we did not have the servers to host them. Now with Hyper-V, we deployed many more servers in VM's, purchased OS's & CAL's, but did not need any hardware, which is the greatest expense of all.
With Hyper-V, our ROI was reduced from 36-40 months on our primary server, down to only 13 months by reducing costs of storage and adding so many more servers, by calculating the "would-be" cost of those servers that was avoided by creating them in Hyper-V.
Saves money on having to buy a Windows and MacBook, as the MacBook can run almost 99% of all Windows software and usually run it faster and share between your MacBook transparently.
Gives employers the most flexibility with regards to which OS to adopt across an enterprise
We are a media company and everyone uses Macs in our industry, Fortune 500 companies also use Windows and MS Project, Parallels gives you the most flexibility for almost all of these use cases
Improves efficiency as the MacBook Pro M3 systems are much faster than some of the fastest corporate issued Windows laptops. What takes me 3-10 seconds for a video export can take 5 minutes on a similar Windows laptop
