Vagrant is used to create and manage consistent virtual machine environments for development and testing. It helps teams reproduce the same setup across machines, reducing configuration differences and making it easier to test software in an isolated environment.

What company sizes and industries is Vagrant the best fit for?

Vagrant is best suited to development and testing teams, with positive experiences concentrated among small businesses and users in several software and technology-related industries.

Company size — Small businesses are the most represented segment, followed by mid-market and enterprise organizations.
Industry — Internet, computer software, and information technology and services are the most represented industries.

What customer support options does Vagrant provide, and how do users find the overall support experience?

Vagrant support includes chat, phone support, and email/help desk, alongside FAQs and a knowledge base. The support experience can be uneven: users describe needing help with setup and configuration, while documentation and community resources can also help them work through issues.

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Craig B.

Chief Technology Officer

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

10/18/2016

"Great, Ephemeral Virtual Machines"

5/5

What do you like best about Vagrant?

I work at the command line every day. I develop in Linux, but have a Mac laptop. I use Vagrant to do all of my development.

How does that work out? On the whole pretty great. Here's what I like:

* Spinning up my development box is as simple as "vagrant up", getting in there is as simple as "vagrant ssh"

* Vagrant boxes are specified in Vagrantfiles, where you describe what steps to do when you make a new one. At this point I have codified most of what I need to spin up a new vagrant box in my Vagrant file. New computer? I'm up and running in a few minutes.

* Vagrant allows us to test out all our builds in a fully virtualized environment on developer laptops. It's actually kinda beautiful. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Vagrant?

I have only one complaint about Vagrant, and to be honest this complaint is largely related to my own misuse of the tool:

If you power off your laptop at the wrong time, it is possible for a Vagrant image to become corrupted. I lost two development boxes to this (in both cases it was when I had to hold the power button because Mac OS locked up for unrelated reasons). It sucks, but that said, it also enforces a mode of thinking around ephemeral machines that I find very helpful. Both times I've lost a vagrant dev box, I've spent some time making my Vagrantfile better so getting back to speed is increasingly painless. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

John B.

Lead Web Engineer

Internet

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

10/18/2016

"Vagrant is the best bad solution to local development"

2.5/5

What do you like best about Vagrant?

Vagrant is much better than trying to run a production-like stack directly on your local machine, especially once you factor in complications like working with a team of developers who run different OSes. Vagrant was a game changer that revolutionized many aspects of software engineering workflow and is still a useful tool with a barrier to entry that isn't prohibitively high. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Vagrant?

It's so unbelievably slow. The rate of development is absolutely glacial. Massive bugs go unfixed and/or unreleased for several months at a time. That wouldn't be so bad if there were an easy way to switch to a development branch of the program, but there isn't. It doesn't scale as a solution: you either have to have several massive VMs installed side-by-side to keep environments discreet or you need to have to use one extra-monolithic VM that has all your environments colocated, which just moves the technical debt Vagrant was meant to solve off of your host machine and into a guest VM. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Vagrant:

Take the time to learn docker properly. You might still use vagrant, but in most cases docker is far superior to vagrant in terms of speed, reliability, development, and team collaboration. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Vagrant solving and how is that benefiting you?

Many of the engineers use vagrant to host their local development environments. It's been helpful for at least getting most development environments to match each other, if not production itself. It also sometimes results in faster onboarding, although it has also been known to cause enormous problems with the same process through obscure bugs specific to various OS configurations. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Andrew S.

Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer

Information Technology and Services

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

10/18/2016

"Vagrant Makes Development Easier"

5/5

What do you like best about Vagrant?

It's awesome to be able to do my development locally with whatever configuration I need. I can shut it down when I'm not using it and switch between boxes quickly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Vagrant?

There are a lot of moving pieces. Do have to decide if you're using shell scripts, puppet, ansible, chef or whatnot. I find it difficult to get it to work on local domains (http://project.app/) so I end up using a custom port which prevents me from running more than one at a time (using the same configuration). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Vagrant:

It's free so give it a shot. If you're building with PHP I'd recommend checking out https://puphpet.com/ or http://phansible.com/ which makes setting up your box easier. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Vagrant solving and how is that benefiting you?

Previously I did all of my development on a remote VPS using ExpanDrive to mount the remote SSH as a local drive. Over the years this has become more fragile and in many cases the latency has gotten to be too much for me. I love being able to have everything local.

Prior to working with the VPS/ExpanDrive workflow, I'd do local development with a local web server and database. That sucked as well because if I wasn't doing development it was still running. It also meant that all my apps needed to use the same stack and the same PHP versions.

Vagrant makes this easier because if I have a project that requires PHP 5.2 and another that I'm building with PHP 7 it's all good. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Medical Devices

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

11/28/2016

"Vagrant leads me into the world of DevOps"

5/5

What do you like best about Vagrant?

I was a developer who doesn't know the concept of DevOps. Before using Vagrant, occasionally, I was annoyed by some Linux configuration, by IDE setup, by repeat LAMP stack configuration, but I had the feeling that something was wrong: there should be a better way to do it. Until starting using Vagrant and HashiCorp's other tools, such as Packer, I began to know another world: DevOps. So, the "everything should be automatic" pattern in my brain, was developed by Linux user experience + Vagrant (HashiCorp). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Vagrant?

I am currently satisfied by Vagrant and HashiCorp's other tools. They are good! Once you learn the "DevOps" pattern from these tools, you will be good to go for any "automatic" patterns. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Charles A.

Sabbatical

Computer Software

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

10/31/2016

"Lather, rinse, repeat"

5/5

What do you like best about Vagrant?

Some of my favorite days are spent iterating machine configurations using Vagrant. I make a change, build the VM, test it out, and destroy the VM fearlessly. It's so much better than working on real production systems or even manually building and rebuilding VMs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Vagrant?

I have encountered some compatibility issues with ancient versions of Linux, but I was able to resolve them by stepping back a few versions of Vagrant. Given the combinatorial explosion of OSes, OS versions, virtualization tools, etc. it's a wonder there aren't more issues. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Education Management

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

3/7/2017

"Dev envs made easy"

5/5

What do you like best about Vagrant?

I love that everything is stored in plain text, so you can share your provisioning file and use version control software like Git. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Vagrant?

Repackaging boxes can be very challenging and I think it should be further improved. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Page W.

UX Manager & Web Developer

Internet

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

10/24/2016

"Used this on many web development projects"

4/5

What do you like best about Vagrant?

Ease of getting all developers using the same environment Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Vagrant?

Not easy for beginners to make changes on how a machine is setup Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Vagrant:

Use it but be prepared for a steep learning curve if you ever must make changes or troubleshoot anything. I would recommend viewing existing projects using vagrant on version control networks. There is a lot that can be gained by reading through vagrant files that others have been using and tweaking successfully for some time. Experiment with changes and do not be afraid to break things. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Vagrant solving and how is that benefiting you?

Ability for developers to run same environment minimizes bugs Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Christopher F.

Founding Partner and Creative Director

Graphic Design

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

6/13/2016

"Quickly create new virtual machine instances for development."

4.5/5

What do you like best about Vagrant?

Vagrant takes much of the guesswork out of creating new virtual machines for development, allowing for quick port and volume mapping, system provisioning, and replication. With good documentation, a great collection of prebuilt configurations, and a community that willingly provides support, Vagrant is an invaluable tool for our workflow. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Vagrant?

Vagrant sometimes hides more than it should, making it difficult for technically competent users who are new to the platform to identify where and how things are working. With a little bit of work it's possible to become familiar, but it could be easier. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Vagrant:

Vagrant is a great first step when moving your software development workflow into the world of virtualization. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Vagrant solving and how is that benefiting you?

We use Vagrant to create easily replicable server environments for the software that we build and deploy. It allows us to easily on-board new developers, ensuring that all project participants are using a consistent environment and toolkit. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Raju M.

Freelance Web Developer

Information Technology and Services

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

5/10/2016

"A simple and easy to setup portable development environment for everyone"

3.5/5

What do you like best about Vagrant?

Vagrant allows you to have a development environment on a virtual machine that can be configured and shared with others. It allows multiple developers to work on the same environment without having to spend time configuring each machine every other time. It helps developers to maintain the same level of configuration and all it takes are a few commands and you are good to go. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Vagrant?

Initially, it was quite difficult to get the networking right because I didn't have much experience with proxying to the virtual machine. This was a little difficult to setup so it took some time before I got used to it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Vagrant:

It is really difficult to start with and takes time to learn how to configure a vagrant machine but once you get the hang of it you could be saving a lot of hours for you and your team. This is a necessary tool for any team working on a web platform. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Vagrant solving and how is that benefiting you?

Every developer has his or her own machine that could be a mac, windows or a linux machine. Getting the same environment for a particular server side programming language is difficult especially if you are on a windows machine, vagrant solves this problem by creating a virtual machine that can be run on every machine with the same specs so everyone has the same machine running during development. Also Laravel Homestead makes use of vagrant, which makes it easy for anyone to bootstrap a laravel project really fast. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.