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Mac

VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop?

Both VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop are a similar price but which to choose? I know VMWare has the edge (perhaps) for performance, but Parallels is (perhaps) better for integration.

Any ideas?

3 Comments

  1. I currently use VMWare Fusion, but was using Parallels for much of last year. I’ve found them to be basically equivalent in everything I care about; they have very similar feature sets, and I believe pretty similar performance overall. (I bought Fusion because at the time it could boot from Boot Camp drives and Parallels couldn’t, but I believe they both can now.)

  2. Hi there Stephen,

    We of course would recommend our own product, but we do think there are a lot of people who agree with us that we are the right choice.

    You can see our aggregated awards, reviews, and press raves here: http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/buzz.html

    But you can also google around, or search what people are saying on Twitter: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=parallels+vmware

    Or look at user reviews on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Smith-Micro-Software-Inc-VMFM20BX2/dp/B001F5VBRU/ref=dp_ob_image_sw

    Most important: You can try Fusion free for 30 days. Give it a spin, see how you like it. Make sure to blog your thoughts. We’re confident you’ll get value out of the software.

    ~Pete
    VMware Fusion Product Marketing

  3. Hi Pete,

    Thanks for that. So far, so good. The Fusion evaluation worked well with installing the latest Ubuntu Linux distribution (though slightly non-trivial to get the Fusion tools installed). Will be trying it with a couple of other OSs in the next week or so. Will post results of that at some point.

    Cheers,

    Stephen