There’s a big hidden cost in those prices: the software license. No matter how much you pay for a virtualization program, remember that you’ll also need to factor in the price of Windows itself.
Meanwhile, Parallels will sell Desktop 7 as an upgrade to owners of older versions for $50 if you’re currently using Fusion, Parallels will sell you Desktop 7 for $30. For example, VMware is currently offering Fusion at a promotional price of $50.
So much for the three categories with relatively clear winners now for the more subjective criteria.įusion and Parallels Desktop both normally cost $80, but pricing for both is a moving target. (Desktop can use VMware’s appliances, but they must first be converted to the Parallels format it doesn’t really seem fair to give the program full credit for that capabiity, if it’s reliant on the VMware ecosystem.) So you want to explore the wild world of operating systems and applications, Fusion is the way to go. VMware’s appliance library is huge, with over 1,900 appliances available Parallels Desktop’ library, on the other hand, contains only 98. Both programs support “virtual appliances”-dowloadable, pre-configured operating systems, often bundled with specific applications. The third big difference: If you want to explore operating systems other than Windows, Fusion offers a much broader universe of alternatives. Parallels Desktop was faster than Fusion in some individual tests, Fusion was faster in others, and in the rest the differences were almost too close to call. Macworld Labs ran both programs through PCWorld’s WorldBench 6 benchmark suite, and the results were close: overall, VMware Fusion beat out Parallels Desktop by a very slight margin (113 to 118, meaning Fusion was 18 percent faster than a theoretical baseline system, Parallels Desktop 13 percent). You can, of course, use them to run other operating systems-including OS X Lion itself-but that’s not the focus here.Īs noted, both Parallels Desktop and Fusion perform well when it comes to running Windows 7 on a Mac. Note that, for the most part, I’ve focused primarily on using these programs to run Windows on your Mac. So this time around, I’ll look at those and try to explain how the two programs differ on each. So instead of picking one program over the other based on how well it performs a given task, the choice now hinges on some more subjective factors. This time, however, that task-based approach didn’t work, largely because (with a couple exceptions that are noted below) the latest versions of Fusion and Parallels Desktop are nearly indistinguishable in performance. So, of those two, how do you decide which one is right for you? In the past, I tried to answer that question by comparing virtualization programs head-to-head, to see how they did on specific tasks.
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