Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
Vagrant vs VirtualBox: What are the differences?
What is Vagrant? A tool for building and distributing development environments. Vagrant provides the framework and configuration format to create and manage complete portable development environments. These development environments can live on your computer or in the cloud, and are portable between Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
What is VirtualBox? Run nearly any operating system on a single machine and to freely switch between OS instances running simultaneously. VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2.
Vagrant can be classified as a tool in the "Virtual Machine Management" category, while VirtualBox is grouped under "Virtualization Platform".
Some of the features offered by Vagrant are:
- Boxes
- Up And SSH
- Synced Folders
On the other hand, VirtualBox provides the following key features:
- Portability
- No hardware virtualization required
- Guest Additions: shared folders, seamless windows, 3D virtualization
"Development environments", "Simple bootstraping" and "Free" are the key factors why developers consider Vagrant; whereas "Free", "Easy" and "Default for vagrant" are the primary reasons why VirtualBox is favored.
Vagrant is an open source tool with 18.6K GitHub stars and 3.74K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Vagrant's open source repository on GitHub.
According to the StackShare community, VirtualBox has a broader approval, being mentioned in 721 company stacks & 944 developers stacks; compared to Vagrant, which is listed in 802 company stacks and 475 developer stacks.
Pros of Vagrant
- Development environments352
- Simple bootstraping290
- Free237
- Boxes139
- Provisioning130
- Portable84
- Synced folders81
- Reproducible69
- Ssh51
- Very flexible44
- Works well, can be replicated easily with other devs5
- Easy-to-share, easy-to-version dev configuration5
- Great3
- Just works3
- Quick way to get running2
- DRY - "Do Not Repeat Yourself"1
- Container Friendly1
- What is vagrant?1
- Good documentation1
Pros of VirtualBox
- Free359
- Easy231
- Default for vagrant169
- Fast110
- Starts quickly73
- Open-source45
- Running in background42
- Simple, yet comprehensive41
- Default for boot2docker27
- Extensive customization22
- Free to use3
- Mouse integration2
- Easy tool2
- Cross-platform2
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
Cons of Vagrant
- Can become v complex w prod. provisioner (Salt, etc.)2
- Multiple VMs quickly eat up disk space2
- Development environment that kills your battery1
Cons of VirtualBox
Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions
What is Vagrant?
What is VirtualBox?
Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
What companies use VirtualBox?
Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions
What tools integrate with Vagrant?
What tools integrate with VirtualBox?
Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions
Blog Posts
+33
+27
+39
+24
+35