Parallels Desktop 8 vs. VMware Fusion 5: Benchmark Showdown

[ksec]

"Consumers may not be happy with the yearly paid update cycles,"

That is one of the complain i heard most about.

"But the fierce competition between Parallels and Fusion has led the market to a mature and capable state and consumers of both products will likely be satisfied with their performance."

I think there is so much truth in it. Without bunch of consumers playing every year, there will be no incentive to make gaming performance and other improvement. This is likely the first time in history Virtualisation has catered Gaming market. And their performance are now, more then enough for most of our usage.

[tanousjm]

Hi guys, thanks for the feedback. We didn't have access to a copy of Parallels 7 for an 8 vs 7 comparison, but we're working on getting one and will update the article when we do.

We're also planning to run tests in native Boot Camp, and we're going to take a look at the free VirtualBox to see if it's worth even paying for these apps at all.

Thanks again, and let me know if you have any other specific benchmarks or apps/games that you'd like us to test. We'll do our best to try everything.

[bdreadz]

Looking forward to the update with things running on a bootcamp partition. This is the way I have it running currently on a couple machines. I've yet to update those to 10.8 as I was waiting for this type of test to start surfacing before making my choice.

[pixie_]

Thank you.

[jmount]

Stopped using both Parallels and VMWare Fusion a while ago. Paid for both- but both of them screwed up too many associations in OSX (Parallels being the worst of the two). They would cause some Microsoft Word documents to open in the emulator (even though I had a current copy of Word in OSX). When I want emulation I want isolation: so I use Virtual Box which I consider better as it has fewer host operating system hooks.

[joethompson]

You can tell Parallels to never cross-associate OS X or Windows programs with each other via the configuration preferences (http://goput.it/s5h.png). I can't speak for Fusion but I would be surprised if they didn't have a similar setting.

[rvid]

I'm curious about how virtual box compares to either of these.

[greedo]

I find Vbox fine for just running one VM. However, I often run 3-4 at a time, and Fusion delivers more performance.

[avens19]

Or Hyper V

[Derbasti]

The only downside to Fusion is that it is usually a bit buggy right after the release. But they are also extremely quick to fix those bugs shortly thereafter. Also, I am extremely impressed with their support.

(How does that compare to Parallels?)

I am looking forward to the forthcoming comparison on arstechnica, though. They usually give the respective GUIs a rundown, too, which I think is more interesting than performance. Also, I would like to see VirtualBox included in those comparisons.

[tanousjm]

In a variety of benchmarks, Parallels 8 beat Fusion 5 by five to twenty percent. But both were remarkably capable of running Windows 7 and Windows 8.

Heck, even Crysis was "playable" on Medium settings.

Any other tests you want to see? Let me know!

[Flow]

I don't think even twice as fast performance will convince me to buy another Parallels upgrade when they treat their customers like this:

http://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/x0qgs/using_parallels_h...

Every time I started Parallels I got a huge window asking me to register in order to get software updates. And when I did I got ads instead. :-(

[joethompson]

A baseline comparison of the same tests running in Boot Camp might give a nice understanding of what kind of general performance loss you're going to get by virtualising at all.

[weaksauce]

I am actually more curious about the percent increase in performance from parallels 7 to parallels 8. Do you have any statistics on that?

[KaoruAoiShiho]

How much faster is P8 than P7? A ballpark approximation would be helpful. Thanks for the report.

[atopuzov]

Is it worth the upgrade form P7 to P8?

[darrenkopp]

While I don't own Parallels 8 or Fusion 5, I will say that I picked Fusion 4 for one reason: It automatically detects my network connection on the host and uses that as the network connection for my VM. It made my life so much easier when I use wired network at work, and wireless network at home.

At the time, Parallels did not have this feature so I would have to go edit the settings of the VM and change the network adapter. I do not know if Parallels has this feature now or if they have added it to the old version since I tried it.

[weaksauce]

It does. It's the default adapter setting.

I personally like the flexibility of parallels in this regard as I use parallels for dev work and need specific network settings to be remembered. Though, there was a spell in which after a while parallels would kill my wireless connection and there would be no internet on my Mac even though I didn't have a network adapter configured to be used on the virtual machine side. Thankfully they fixed this as it was extremely annoying.

[zemaj]

I used to use Fusion on my mid-2010 MacBook Pro and found it pretty much unusable as it was so slow. However I recently installed Parallels on my Rentina MacBook and I've been amazed at the difference. It can run 3 different OSs at once on top of OsX with barely a performance hit. It makes debugging in IE finally practical. Probably the single biggest benefit for me for upgrading my MacBook.

[bsg75]

Does Fusion have a convenience advantage when also using VMWare Workstation or other server products, with the ability to move the same VMs between platforms?