VMware Fusion offers the flexibility and compatibility of the VMware environment in a fast and usable OS X wrapper, and with solid OS X integration for supported guest operating systems.
It's a well-crafted product, and the developer community offers somewhat broader driver support for VMware than they do for its major competitor, Oracle's VirtualBox.
VMware Fusion is definitely a desktop user-oriented product, and shows a clear developer focus on Windows guests, with quick, integrated access to apps in Windows VMs available through Fusion's OS X menu bar application. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
VMware Fusion's preference interface, while slightly more "Mac-like" in appearance than VirtualBox, also obfuscates details which VirtualBox exposes (such as the specific identities of emulated chipsets), complicating the configuration of older or less well-supported OSes which do not have VMware drivers available.
The Fusion interface also buries some necessary functions several levels deep. Switching optical or floppy drive images, for instance, requires several clicks in Fusion, while VirtualBox places recent media in a simple drop-down menu on the main application frame.
Finally, headless operation and server integration is not as transparent in VMware Fusion as it is in VirtualBox, and VMware's offerings are quite different on different host OSes.
Slightly better breadth of guest OS support may not justify the purchase of VMware Fusion for many users, when VirtualBox is available for free, and better exposes its more powerful features to the user. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
