New Parallels vs. VMware Fusion?

New versions of Parallels and VMware Fusion have both been released in the last few weeks. I have licenses for older versions of both. For the past couple of years I’ve been using Fusion, but I’ve been increasingly frustrated by the performance, particularly when using one specialized Windows application that can be an extreme resource hog.

Parallels 14 came out first, and I saw a couple of early reviews that mentioned that it was considerably faster than Fusion 10, which is the version I’m running. I haven’t seen any third-party reviews of Fusion 11 yet. Has anyone here tried the new releases?

I have actually never used Fusion, I have always been a Parallels user. So I can’t really answer the last question.

I did however read this one: A long time VMware Fusion user tries Parallels 14, at 9to5mac. I don’t know if you read that one, but it might help.

Since you have a specialized use case, you might give the 14 day trial a shot.

I just upgraded to Fusion 11 on my 2017 MBP w/ TB running Mojave.

Early impressions on a Linux VM is that it seems faster overall. I didn’t run it long enough to check battery drain though. I have a Win10 VM on another machine I can check once I get a chance to upgrade Fusion there.

I run a Windows 10 VM on Parallels (using Parallels 14, now) on a 2017 MBP most of the work day. I haven’t had a performance issue on Parallels since at least Parallels 9 and so far Parallels 14 has been just as reliable as Parallels 13 and prior. There are no major improvements visible, but it does seem to run quicker in Coherence on Mojave. I think Parallels 14 is mainly a “optimized for Mojave” upgrade.

This reply might be seen as out of order, but had you tried Virtualbox?

Tried it once very briefly a couple of years ago. Unsurprisingly, it seemed a lot less polished than either of the commercial options. I already had licenses for both of those and didn’t see any clear advantages to VB, so I didn’t spend any more time with it. Does it have any advantages apart from being free — particularly in terms of RAM and CPU efficiency?