Thinking about switching?
One guide per tool, each opening with the case for staying where you are. Switching a virtual-machine workflow is expensive and most people should not do it — these pages are written to help you decide, not to talk you into it.
Desktop VM apps
Switching from Parallels Desktop
The consumer-grade way to run Windows on a Mac — Coherence, one-click Windows 11 on ARM, DirectX and OpenGL.
Read the guide
Switching from VMware Fusion
The free, full-featured desktop hypervisor for Mac power users — now Broadcom-owned, still capable, awkward to obtain.
Read the guide
Switching from UTM
The free, Mac-native front end over QEMU and Apple Virtualization — run almost any architecture, at the cost of configuration.
Read the guide
Switching from Oracle VirtualBox
The cross-platform, GPL desktop hypervisor everyone already knows — now booting ARM guests on Apple silicon.
Read the guide
Switching from VirtualBuddy
A free, focused Mac app for virtualizing macOS 12 and later on Apple silicon — built for developers testing against betas.
Read the guideCommand-line VM tools
Switching from Lima
CLI-first virtual machines on macOS — Linux, with experimental macOS guests since v2.1 — defaulting to Apple Virtualization with QEMU as the escape hatch.
Read the guide
Switching from Tart
A CLI toolset for macOS and Linux virtual machines on Apple silicon, built for CI, with OCI-pushable images and instant APFS clones.
Read the guide
Switching from Multipass
Canonical's one-command Ubuntu virtual machine, with cloud-init, on macOS, Windows and Linux.
Read the guide
Switching from Cua (Lume)
Open-source infrastructure for computer-use AI agents, whose Lume component manages macOS and Linux VMs on Apple silicon.
Read the guide
Switching from Orchard
An orchestrator that runs Tart virtual machines across a cluster of Apple silicon machines, with a REST API.
Read the guideContainer platforms
Switching from OrbStack
The fast, Mac-only Docker Desktop replacement that also runs Linux machines — deliberately not a general hypervisor.
Read the guide
Switching from Colima
Docker and Kubernetes on macOS through a Lima virtual machine — the lightweight, free answer to Docker Desktop, now with an AI model runner.
Read the guide
Switching from Dory
A native macOS local development system — Docker, Compose, Kubernetes, Linux VMs and agent sandboxes in one app.
Read the guideThe one-line version
If the tool you already use does your job — Coherence, Docker, Ubuntu in one command, macOS CI images, or x86 emulation — keep it. 1VMTool is worth moving for when you want reset-to-clean to be cheaper than cleaning, on macOS 26, on Apple silicon.
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