Parallels

★★★★☆

A virtual machine application for macOS that makes it easy to install a Windows, Linux or macOS guest.

Good

Stable and fast. Automatically installs and updates Parallels Tools on supported guests for interaction between the VM and host system. (Shared folders, copy/paste, stuff like that.) That includes major Linux distros like Fedora and Debian (but not immutable distros). Virtual networks work right out of the box.

Plus I can actually find the downloads, unlike VMWare.

It’ll automatically download and install Windows 11, the macOS version you’re running, and a handful of major Linux distros with the necessary hardware configs, or you can install from an ISO you’ve downloaded.

Provides snapshot backups and varying levels of isolation and integration. Pause and resume work just fine. You can tell a Windows guest to open links in your host system’s web browser, or tell the host system to open some file types in a Windows application. Displaying a Windows VM’s apps and menus directly in the macOS environment (what VMWare calls Unity and Parallels calls Coherence) is surprisingly smooth.

Bad

Requires a paid subscription to run it on my own hardware. Frequently tries to upsell me the confusingly-named Parallels Toolbox. (Not often, but enough to be annoying.)

Ugly

Installing an unsupported OS (like a *BSD, for instance) can be dicey. Emulating Intel hardware on ARM is possible, but limited and slow (and requires terminal commands to create a new guest machine). UTM is more likely to work in both cases.

Keep in Mind

MacOS VMs can only log into some iCloud services (and then only on macOS 15 and later), and the App store isn’t one of them, so anything you want to run on a Mac VM has to be available from another source. This is true for any virtualization framework, not just Parallels. And it’s super-annoying if you just want to test something from the app store in a virtual machine.