Item: Parallels Desktop for Mac
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Parallels Desktop

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Parallels Desktop is primarily used for testing Microsoft Windows browsers within macOS. Running Microsoft Windows 10 within Parallels allows us to test both the Internet Explorer 11 and Microsoft Edge browsers for front-end development. It can also be used to run Windows-specific software that will not work in macOS, as well as add support for writing to NTFS drive partitions.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Easy to use
Easy to setup
Support for all major guest operating systems
Good integration within macOS
Good performance

Cons

Expensive
Pricing and release model forces yearly upgrades
Some default settings can be undesirable if wanting to reduce integration with macOS

Return on Investment

Saves time testing browsers
Cheaper than Browserstack for Windows-only browser testing
Offline browser testing

Alternatives Considered

VirtualBox and VMWare

Parallels has better performance and easier setup than VirtualBox (and VMWare the last time I tried it). Parallels is fairly expensive, while VirtualBox is free, so going with VirtualBox will save quite a bit of money. The strength of VirtualBox lies in use with Vagrant and command-line only virtual machines. For more user-friendly virtual machines, Parallels works very well.

Other Software Used

GitHub, Slack, Adobe Illustrator CC

Likelihood to Recommend

Parallels Desktop is great if you want to get good performance when running Microsoft Windows within macOS, and it will work much better than something like VirtualBox for this.

Although Parallels Desktop could be used for running local Vagrant virtual machines, VirtualBox works just fine and will save a lot of money.

For easiest possible setup and use with Windows, I would choose Parallels, but if you only need command-line only virtual machines, I would go with VirtualBox.

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