Parallels Desktop for Mac vs. VMware Fusion

Parallels Desktop for Mac

Parallels Desktop for Mac

87 Reviews and Ratings

VMware Fusion

VMware Fusion

75 Reviews and Ratings

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
Parallels Desktop for Mac	Score 9.4 out of 10	N/A	Parallels® Desktop for Mac is used to run Windows on Intel or Apple silicon. Users can switch between Mac and Windows applications, while retaining the macOS appearance, or use the familiar Windows desktop aesthetic.	$99.99 per year
VMware Fusion	Score 7.2 out of 10	N/A	Vmware Fusion is a virtual user session software built to run Windows applications on Macintosh to run any Windows applications.	N/A

Pricing

Parallels Desktop for Mac

VMware Fusion

Editions & Modules

Parallels Desktop Standard Edition: $99.99
per year
Mac App Store: $99.99
per year
Parallels Desktop Pro Edition: $119.99
per year
Parallels Desktop Business Edition: $149.99
per year

No answers on this topic

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
Parallels Desktop for Mac	VMware Fusion
Free Trial
Yes	No
Free/Freemium Version
No	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	Parallels Desktop for Mac	VMware Fusion
Considered Both Products	Parallels Desktop for Mac Stefan Boeykens sr. BIM Manager Chose Parallels Desktop for Mac I have used VirtualBox on Windows as a free alternative, as I only used it to access an old scanner without recent drivers. So far, I stick with Parallels, but the OpenGL limitations are said to be resolved better with VMware Fusion. But I currently don't want to migrate to … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose Parallels Desktop for Mac Parallels Desktop ends up filling the sweet spot between free, but basic application (VirtualBox), and fully featured enterprise application (VMware Fusion.). Even at this point, we don't use all of the features of Parallels, but the perceived performance boost over VirtualBox … Incentivized Helpful? Jason White Sr. End User Supt. Analyst Chose Parallels Desktop for Mac VMware Fusion is also a good product, but it tended to be a little more difficult to configure, and the price tag was higher in terms of the volume purchasing that we required. Incentivized Helpful? Jonah Dempcy Web & Mobile Developer Chose Parallels Desktop for Mac I'm a longtime user of VMware Fusion and I still use it in some cases. We use it on RedHat Linux computers to run other Linux environments with specific software development environment configurations. I've also used VMware Fusion on a MacBook Pro laptop to run Windows and … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Director Chose Parallels Desktop for Mac Parallels [Desktop] is more polished and has a friendlier interface than VMware Fusion. While the VMware Fusion licensing model is simpler Parallels [Desktop] innovates faster and optimizes their product more often and with more features that customers want. At their core they … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Professional Chose Parallels Desktop for Mac We have tried VMware Fusion and Boot Camp. However, the level of graphics that we get in Parallels is much better compared to the other two tools. The speed, overall performance, ease of access, and features are a lot better on Parallels. Overall integration with Mac resources … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Team Lead Chose Parallels Desktop for Mac Runs much smoother, support is better. Price set at the time was much better. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Engineer Chose Parallels Desktop for Mac At the end of the day, it seemed like Parallels Desktop has the fastest product with a feature set that was most important to our users. Additionally, it seemed to hit a mark where it was easy enough for our less tech-savvy users, but powerful enough for our users that really … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Professional Chose Parallels Desktop for Mac Parallels Desktop is faster when compared to other solutions, assuming that is for Mac computers only, is the fastest option and easiest to run Incentivized Helpful? Jose Almiñana SAP Solution Architect Chose Parallels Desktop for Mac Main two features that made the balance decission go to the Parallels Desktop were the possibility to pause the Windows partition easily (allowing to consume less resources in Mac and save battery) and the other one is the user interface feature called "Coherence" with allows … Incentivized Helpful? Will Goad VP - Solutions Chose Parallels Desktop for Mac If you can follow a prompt and click a button, you can install Parallels. We chose Parallels because they make it so simple to buy, install, set up, and add licenses. I work with Creatives and getting them to run a Windows environment is a painful task. With Parallels, we can … Incentivized Helpful?	VMware Fusion Verified User Engineer Chose VMware Fusion If you only need to run a single Windows VM for a handful of applications and do not need to do testing or run multiple operating systems, Parallels Desktop may be the better choice, especially for less technical end users. Parallels is a bit more user friendly. If you need … Incentivized Helpful? Matteo Bisi DevSecOps Engineer Chose VMware Fusion Oracle virtualbox has not reason to exist anymore, considering VMware Fusion pro is free for personal and not business use. I think VMware Fusion is better in every aspect. Parallels it's a great alternative, especially if you need only windows. If you need also linux Fusion is … Incentivized Helpful? SS Shion Song Art Director & Web Developer Chose VMware Fusion As mentioned previously, perpetual licensing was the #1 reason. The interface is also cleaner, simpler, and less bloat. Parallels also seem to run a bit slower. Fusion was also more stable and significantly faster in both raw performance and graphics compared to Virtualbox. … Incentivized Helpful? Jonah Dempcy Web & Mobile Developer Chose VMware Fusion GitHub and Bitbucket are both used by our company for code sharing and are much easier to use for collaborative source code versioning. We internally use GitHub and have some clients who use Bitbucket. In some cases, we have software projects that are very hard to configure, … Incentivized Helpful? Stefan Semo Director of IT Infrastructure, Security & Compliance and Customer Service Chose VMware Fusion VMWare Fusion is easier to deploy and manage than Parallels and also has a much simpler and less expensive licensing system. For us these are win-win. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Professional Chose VMware Fusion To be fair, with other products, if pricing was a problem for the organization, I would choose VirtualBox, because it works very well on Mac environment and it has most of the features that VMware Fusion has. However, I personally like the way I can run my Microsoft Windows … Incentivized Helpful? AP Aaron Pinsker Owner Chose VMware Fusion As Hyper-V is Windows specific product, and primarily designed for Windows Server, it is difficult to compare Fusion and Hyper-V as they cater to different customer needs. Comparing Fusion to Parallels is a bit more complicated as they are extremely similar products. Briefly, … Incentivized Helpful? Alex Waitkus, CISSP-ISSAP, OSCP Security Architect Chose VMware Fusion VM Fusion is a leader. It has more functionality and capability for workstation virtualization application. Its unity view and resource management of virtual guests is far superior to any other Mac workstation virtualization applications on the market. Incentivized Helpful? Kurt Pritchett Senior System Engineer Chose VMware Fusion VMware Fusion works much better for us because of the migration capabilities. We use VMware vSphere and the migration/conversion is seamless. Some of the other virtualization application do not covert or migrate VMs onto other platforms as easily. Incentivized Helpful? Andrew Shannon Director of Technology Chose VMware Fusion VMware fusion is very similar to Parallels but is lower priced, so its my preferred solution for running Windows on a macintosh computer. Vmware is also made by a much more well known company with a large support staff in place, so getting help with vmware fusion is always … Incentivized Helpful? Zach Cooper Site Reliability Engineer Chose VMware Fusion Fusion seems to run better than Parallels. It also is much more user friendly and intuitive to use. Incentivized Helpful? Gabriel Duff Macintosh Service Desk Technician III Chose VMware Fusion All of this changes from year to year, too. Parallels and VMware both require that you buy an annual license every year to get updates that pack in performance gains and feature improvements. These annual updates are great in theory, but they’re not cheap, and they come every … Incentivized Helpful?

TrustRadius Insights
	Parallels Desktop for Mac	VMware Fusion
Highlights	Research Team Insight Published June 10, 2020 Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion are both remote desktop software designed to help users run windows software on computers running the Mac OS operating system. Both software options are most popular with mid-sized businesses, but VMware fusion is slightly more popular with larger enterprises, perhaps due to its integrations with other VMware software. Features Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion both offer essential remote desktop features such as screen capture and viewing, but they also have a few standout features that set them apart from each other. Parallels Desktop offers simple installation of multiple operating systems such as Windows and Ubuntu with a single click. Additionally, Parallels Desktop offers fast boots, with Windows boots generally finishing in under 5 seconds. Lastly, Parallels Desktop allows for optimized virtual machine resource usage by allowing for virtual machine pauses, and disk optimization. VMware Fusion provides high performance virtual machines, especially in terms of graphics. In benchmarking tests, Vmware Fusion performs better graphically than most remote desktop software including Parallels. VMware Fusion also offers support for high performance monitors, including 5k iMacs. Limitations Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion can both run Windows Software on Mac devices, but they have some limitations that are important to consider. Parallels Desktop performs well in CPU tests, but does not perform as well as VMware Fusion when it comes to graphics. Businesses looking for high performance graphics should consider other options. Compounding this issue, Parallels doesn’t include native support for 5k monitors, so businesses that need highest quality aesthetics may prefer VMware Fusion. VMware Fusion is more difficult to implement compared to Parallels. Multiple operating systems can be installed using VMware Fusion, but not with a single click. Additionally, while VMware Fusion performs well graphically, it doesn’t perform as well in CPU tests and takes longer to boot up virtual machines. Pricing Parallels offers a single price point for businesses, $99.99 per year for each license. VMware Fusion similarly offers a single rate for businesses, $79.99 per year per license.

Features

Parallels Desktop for Mac

VMware Fusion

Application Virtualization

Comparison of Application Virtualization features of Product A and Product B
	Parallels Desktop for Mac 9.1 3 Ratings 17% above category average	VMware Fusion - Ratings
Application support	8.73 Ratings	00 Ratings
Ease of deployment	9.43 Ratings	00 Ratings
Security	9.43 Ratings	00 Ratings

Best Alternatives
	Parallels Desktop for Mac	VMware Fusion
Small Businesses	Parallels RAS Score 8.8 out of 10	Parallels RAS Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Nutanix AHV Score 9.1 out of 10	Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure Score 8.8 out of 10
Enterprises	Nutanix AHV Score 9.1 out of 10	Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure Score 8.8 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Parallels Desktop for Mac	VMware Fusion
Likelihood to Recommend	9.4 (33 ratings)	8.0 (20 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	10.0 (2 ratings)	10.0 (2 ratings)
Usability	10.0 (5 ratings)	8.0 (4 ratings)
Support Rating	9.0 (6 ratings)	10.0 (5 ratings)
Implementation Rating	10.0 (2 ratings)	10.0 (1 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Parallels Desktop for Mac	VMware Fusion
Likelihood to Recommend	Alludo Parallels works just like a window or application on the Mac. Hence, it is beneficial to keep both OS versions hand in hand. Parallels is very useful when writing code for mobile/iOS applications. File sharing and paste functions are very easy to use. More than one machine can be taken on Parallels. It also integrates with Microsoft Intune. It can run other OS versions other than Windows. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	VMware by Broadcom Due to its perpetual licensing model, VMware Fusion is a great option for users whose needs do not change as much over time. It is also great for occasional-use scenarios such as testing and preparing code to run on newer platforms. Fusion is not really recommended for running graphics-intense applications as graphics acceleration in Fusion is fairly limited in both performance and API support. It has, however, come a very long way and offers near-native performance for many tasks. Incentivized SS Shion Song Art Director & Web Developer Read full review
Pros	Alludo File Transfer - You can easily transfer files between Parallels virtualized desktops and the host desktop either through Copy and Paste functionality, or Drag and Drop. You can also configure shared folders. Switch Between Virtual and Host Desktop - You can configure swipe gestures on a MacBook Pro to be able to switch between the virtualized and host desktop. You can also launch apps from the OS X Taskbar. Performance - Apps in Parallels run quite smoothly on my 2015 MacBook Pro, as of 2020. Considering they are running on a 5-year-old computer, I give Parallels top marks for performance. Incentivized Jonah Dempcy Web & Mobile Developer Read full review	VMware by Broadcom Allows users to run Windows only applications on their Mac without switching devices. Fusion is excellent for Windows image creation, and works exceptionally well on the Mac environment. Assists a Mac user to virtualize Windows apps. Excellent for installing Linux distros for penetration testing. Incentivized Michael Timms IT Specialist Read full review
Cons	Alludo Having to buy a new upgrade whenever Apple updates the OS with its yearly releases seems a bit excessive. The integration features between Windows and Mac are enabled by default, which can clutter both sides; I would rather it was not default. Incentivized EG Eddie Galvez VP Read full review	VMware by Broadcom With OSX - 10.14.1 and the latest version of Fusion - 11.0.2 the user interface has taken a step back IMHO. I would like to see price decrease. Better remote host connection capabilities - remote server connections are available but connections are spotty. Incentivized Alex Waitkus, CISSP-ISSAP, OSCP Security Architect Read full review
Likelihood to Renew	Alludo Users are familiar with the application which will keep us going for a little while. However since we are seeing a decline for a need for the software, I wouldn't be surprised to find that this answer changes dramatically in the near future. We would probably keep it to some extent, but we would probably reduce our licensing count. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	VMware by Broadcom For Apple workstations VMware Fusion is the virtualization software to use. No other application (free or paid) can do what Fusion can. The features and constant updates make Fusion an application that cant be beat. Incentivized Alex Waitkus, CISSP-ISSAP, OSCP Security Architect Read full review
Usability	Alludo It has a good integration, including the connection of peripherals. Taking files back and forth works well and I can attach my Home drive as a network drive in Windows. There is even integration with iCloud and other macOS services. There are also a few different display modes which are useful and fleixible (coherence, windowed, full-screen with multiple screens) Incentivized Stefan Boeykens sr. BIM Manager Read full review	VMware by Broadcom I made an 8 because it's good in almost every aspect. As I said if you are on macos and you need both windows and linux I think is the best options out there. Otherwise if you need only windows there is a competitor that could be better for performance and integration. Incentivized Matteo Bisi DevSecOps Engineer Read full review
Support Rating	Alludo So, this rating is a little skewed toward older behavior from Parallels, as I haven't had to contact them recently. However, in an older version of Parallels, an "update" included pop-ups urging users to upgrade to the latest version, implying that their current version wouldn't work for the latest MacOS. I found it very frustrating to be getting ads for a new version of the software in a version I had already paid for. I contacted support about this and got a generic, uncaring response. It was pretty disappointing. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	VMware by Broadcom I have never contacted VMware, but there is a lot of support online on message boards, forums, StackOverflow, YouTube tutorial videos, and the like. VMware has been around nine years longer than its leading competitor, VirtualBox, although both seem to have a good presence of online user communities who can help solve issues that come up. Incentivized Jonah Dempcy Web & Mobile Developer Read full review
Implementation Rating	Alludo The only advice I can provide is think about who is using the product and build the image based on the true needs of the user. Incentivized Denise Wade IT support specialist /Mac Support Read full review	VMware by Broadcom This is a workstation application and no install insights are needed. Incentivized Alex Waitkus, CISSP-ISSAP, OSCP Security Architect Read full review
Alternatives Considered	Alludo Main two features that made the balance decission go to the Parallels Desktop were the possibility to pause the Windows partition easily (allowing to consume less resources in Mac and save battery) and the other one is the user interface feature called "Coherence" with allows you to show the Windows application windows as if they were native to the macOS, allowing for a better user experience. Incentivized Jose Almiñana SAP Solution Architect Read full review	VMware by Broadcom I've heard of other/competitive software but frankly once I tried VMware, I never looked back. There is absolutely nothing that I need that this product does not deliver. It's fast, effective and seems to be extremely durable and reliable. My only concern (and minor) might have to do with memory resources, but frankly it has not been an issue yet. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Return on Investment	Alludo Saves money on having to buy a Windows and MacBook, as the MacBook can run almost 99% of all Windows software and usually run it faster and share between your MacBook transparently. Gives employers the most flexibility with regards to which OS to adopt across an enterprise We are a media company and everyone uses Macs in our industry, Fortune 500 companies also use Windows and MS Project, Parallels gives you the most flexibility for almost all of these use cases Improves efficiency as the MacBook Pro M3 systems are much faster than some of the fastest corporate issued Windows laptops. What takes me 3-10 seconds for a video export can take 5 minutes on a similar Windows laptop Incentivized KG Kris Giorgetti Partner Read full review	VMware by Broadcom Users using a VM often don't need something as "fancy" as VMware Fusion, and instead can use a free option like Virtual Box, so we waste money on using an extra amount of VMware Fusion licenses. Developers using and IT admins using VMware Fusion for testing saves us time and money. Simply, we know mistakes would take time and money to fix, but VMware is powerful, allows for proper and fast testing. Incentivized Fatima T Enterprise Support Manager Read full review
ScreenShots	Parallels Desktop for Mac Screenshots

	
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