Qemu vs VirtualBox: What are the differences?

What is Qemu? A generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer. When used as a machine emulator, it can run OSes and programs made for one machine (e.g. an ARM board) on a different machine (e.g. your own PC). By using dynamic translation, it achieves very good performance When used as a virtualizer, it achieves near native performance by executing the guest code directly on the host CPU. it supports virtualization when executing under the Xen hypervisor or using the KVM kernel module in Linux. When using KVM, it can virtualize x86, server and embedded PowerPC, 64-bit POWER, S390, 32-bit and 64-bit ARM, and MIPS guests..

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.

Qemu and VirtualBox belong to "Virtualization Platform" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Qemu are:

• machine emulator and virtualizer

- dynamic translation

On the other hand, VirtualBox provides the following key features:

• Portability
• No hardware virtualization required
• Guest Additions: shared folders, seamless windows, 3D virtualization

According to the StackShare community, VirtualBox has a broader approval, being mentioned in 981 company stacks & 6172 developers stacks; compared to Qemu, which is listed in 4 company stacks and 6 developer stacks.