I haven't seen any benchmarks recently, but it's historically been noticeably faster. Vagrant's VMware plugin page has a general overview, although it's marketing material and not very technical: https://www.vagrantup.com/vmware/

Technically speaking, it is miles better: faster and more robust, as well as more polished.

However, it's losing the standardization field to VirtualBox, all OSS tools are using that by default and vmware support is always lagging.

Nested virtualisation. To my knowledge VirtualBox does not yet support this, and has been steadfast in its refusal for years[1].

[1] https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/4032

I develop on linux vm running on a windows host, I've found VMWare to be considerably more stable and slightly more performant than virtualbox.

My personal experience: It depends on the guest OS.

I'm on a Mac. VMWare Fusion runs Windows 7 and 8 with noticeably less lag than VirtualBox. For Linux (Ubuntu Trusty) and FreeBSD 10, I've never noticed a difference.

I am trying VirtualBox from time to time but so far VMWare wins every time. It's faster and has better hardware compatibility.

Mostly serial or usb interface speed and driver issues when running windows hosts. Virtualbox is certainly getting better and better in that regard though.

There is also better gpu support from anedotal experience.

Related question: What about VMware/VirtualBox vs qemu-kvm?

Obviously its UI etc is much more raw - I'm curious how it compares performancewise.