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Fusion or Parallels: which would you buy today?

iSee

iSee

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Oct 25, 2004
3,545
304
I'm going to buy the latest version of VMWare Fusion or Parallels in the next 30 min.

Which would you buy today?

I've used older versions of both and they were both fine (though Parallels was better for my task at the time, which involved USB devices and sharing a Mac folder with the VM).

Tonight, I'm just going to set up a web server in IIS, which I think they can both do just fine.

But I'm just wondering if one is clearly better than the other right now.

NOTE: bootcamp won't work for me since I want to have an OS X client access a web service hosted by IIS.
 
If you insist on buying one, I would go for Fusion. However, I would use VirtualBox. It is free, and operates just like both Parallels and Fusion.

TEG
 
Thanks for the helpful replies.

Duff-Man said:
Duff-Man says...I would buy the one that searches the forums for threads that have been done countless times already....oh yeah!
Click to expand...

How would that answer the question "which would you buy today?"

(Of course I did search the treads and got an endless list of out-of-date threads... hence the question. Oh, no!)
 
I actually own all three.

I settled on Parallels. Nice keyboard & mouse integration. 256MB of video memory possible. Smaller footprint and VM drives.

Fusion seemed to take care of more than I wanted and I really did not give it a good look.

Virtualbox is not elegant especially with mouse/keyboard integration. Its a geeks version and while it has a lot of settings, by default its just no really ready to go.

I deleted Fusion & Virtualbox.

I got parallels in that macupdate bundle.
 
I was going to buy Fusion . . . But I decided to test VirtualBox first. I am happy with it. I am running a Win7 VM with Quicken and my genealogy software.
 
Depending on your needs, each product has something slightly different to offer.

For me stability and great support are high on my list. With that in mind VMware is the best bet. Its a great product that is very stable and the support is top notch.

If you play games or want fast opengl/directx support then parallels will be the natural choice. Parallels seems to push out more updates faster then vmware, but those updates tend to be buggy. Support from them has been problematic most of the time.

Virtualbox is free but it lacks features the other two offers, little to know support unless you consider google support and Its the worst performing of the two. I tried and put down virtualbox, its free but what good is a product if it hinders your work, and this for me did that.

Bootcamp can be a great choice if you want access to hardware or need the performance for things like games. The major downside though is you have leave OSX and boot into windows. For me, I prefer to stay in OSX :)
 
I use Fusion all the time for work. We settled on fusion because of the cross platform support. I can use fusion to create images that PC's can use with the free vmWare Player. This is great; out entire test environment can be virtualized meaning we can setup clean windows XP, Vista, and 7 builds and then install our apps / hardware and know that there is no corruption from old drivers or DLL's.

Parallels is good, but Fusion is very stable. Parallels doesn't offer a windows version, so no way to us to use it.
 
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