Vmware Workstation Pro 17 Apr 2026

Rating: 4.7/5 Best for: Developers, IT pros, security researchers, and power users who need near-bare-metal performance from VMs.

You are a casual user running Linux on Windows occasionally, or you’re on an M-series Mac. Also, skip if you refuse to deal with Broadcom’s awkward licensing portal. VMware Workstation Pro 17

While great under load, the VMware services (vmware-authd, vmware-usbarbitrator) consume 300-500MB of RAM even when no VMs are running . On a laptop with 8GB of RAM, this hurts. Rating: 4

The snapshot manager is best-in-class. Need to test a risky update or malware? Take a snapshot, wreck the VM, revert in 3 seconds. The linked clones feature saves terabytes of disk space when spinning up multiple test environments. Rating: 4.7/5 Best for: Developers