Kasm Workspaces vs. VMware Workstation Player

Kasm Workspaces is a good fit for when you need to provide home-based workers access to corporate information or application, but you don't want to provide full network access through a VPN connection. It works well for when you want to ensure that data cannot be taken out of the network or you want to allow non-company devices to be used to access internal resources.

VMware will work great for the following test scenarios:

• Testing windows updates on a system
• Testing a new software or a new software version
• Creating a sandbox to test options/features of an OS
• Creating different VM to test a software on different OS without the need to have physical machines for all of them

You can also use it as a "player" only where you have that static VM that you run from time to time as with my use for SAS University. Whenever you need to use the software, you simply start that VM.

Incentivized

• Access from the web browser without having to install an agent or a VPN.
• Can be used on personal devices since the data is not stored on the device.
• No risk of data loss since the information never leaves the company network.

• VMware Player is easy to use.
• VMware Player supports a wide variety operating systems.
• Unity mode makes it easy for the end user to utilize needed legacy applications while maintaining their familiar Host OS desktop. It's seamless to the point where the end user doesn't know they're running applications from a VM.

Incentivized

• Remote workers had to be familiarized with the browser-in-browser for web applications.

• Would be nice to use more VMs at once, but this is basically trial software, so it's hard to fault them.

Incentivized

I give a rating of 8 because VMware Player has its use cases, for example it requires the host OS to be logged in, and the VMware Player application to be opened and the Guest VM started. Only one VM can run at a time. I'd give a 9/10 to VMware Workstation because you can run shared VMs at startup without logging in or starting the workstation application. and i'd give ESX a 10/10 because ESX is the leader in enterprise visualization.

Incentivized

Great product. Its user-friendly GUI and overall performance are really the biggest strength of this tool. The reason why I don't give a higher note is because of the price. Although it's decent (starting at around $200 for a license), there is a good free alternative in VirtualBox. Not everyone values friendly GUI as something worth paying for. For people that are more tech-savvy, I would recommend looking into VirtualBox as they might actually like the model better (with downloadable add-ons and packages).

Incentivized

Integration isn't really relevant here but I see this question more as an OS compatibility for the VM. They state that they support over 200 different OS versions. I honestly have never tried anything else other than Ubuntu and Windows myself but nonetheless, this is impressive. I have not hit any limitation in my use of this software in terms of limitation or conflicts with other software.

Incentivized

The Kasm support team is always responsive to our questions. They interact with us directly, even as a small customer. They also notify us of software updates and check in on our usage of the software.

VMware support is very knowledgeable on their products, eveything from AirWatch to ESX clusters. VMware is easy to contact, they stay in touch and see the issue through to the end and a final resolution. They keep you up to date on your issue status and don't leave you waiting for answers.

Incentivized

Installing the application was easily completed on the twenty computers that needed VMware Player. Once those 20 users were configured we copied our virtual machine template to the 20 users and turned on their newly provisioned virtual machines. We then configured unity mode so the user could easily work from within the virtual machine from their host desktop.

Incentivized

Kasm is alot more cost effective than Citrix or VMWare. We wanted an on-premise solution to provide remote access to our internal network resources. The Citrix and VMware solutions require significantly more hardware to run, since Kasm runs on a Linux server as containers and each of the images run as a small container. The licenses were significantly less expensive for Kasm too.

Both free, VMware supports USB 3.0 while VirtualBox does not. VMware supports nested hardware-assisted virtualization while VirtualBox does not.

Incentivized

• Increased productivity by enabling a remote workforce.
• Allows work from any location or any device.

• A positive impact is that it require little to no funding to use.
• Negative impact is that because it is free it can be hard to get support.