No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Cisco VXI vs VMware Workstation comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco VXI
Ranking in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
23rd
Average Rating
7.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Workstation
Ranking in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
2nd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
57
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) category, the mindshare of Cisco VXI is 1.2%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Workstation is 9.8%, down from 17.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Workstation9.8%
Cisco VXI1.2%
Other89.0%
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
 

Featured Reviews

Sina Ghozati - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Solution Specialist at Arrow Electronics
Straightforward implementation, scalable, but performance could improve
When using Cisco VXI in virtual environments there tends to be a lot of bugs with files you have to deploy across the virtual environment. You configure for hours, and then there is a bug that stops you, and you notice that you wasted hours. There's always room for improvement with these virtual environments because you're not dealing with the actual equipment, you're dealing with a virtual version of it that you have to install in a virtual environment. The performance of Cisco VXI could improve. It requires a lot of hardware and even if you install it on a server it is heavy on resources.
GC
Director of IT at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Creating and destroying test machines has simplified our operations and reduced manual recovery time
The Snapshot feature has helped with workflows by allowing us to more easily reconstruct something if we lose it or need it. We've been making Snapshots on a consistent basis, mainly of servers. The VX Rail has worked effectively because we can create machines as we need them. It's helpful for resetting and has helped with our operations because I had set up failover servers on Vertex, but we don't have to do that anymore since VMware will just create a new machine immediately if we have a problem. We're doing our domain servers on there, and we've been very happy with that. We appreciate that we can create machines simply to test things out and then destroy them. I use it for a test machine for checking emails, so if the email has a virus in it, we can just destroy the machine and create a new one. We're slowly moving into the VMware environment, although the pricing with Broadcom has been a disaster.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The initial setup of Cisco VXI is straightforward."
"The solution has been doing a good job for us."
"We initially intended to work with Hyper-V because we are selling a virtual appliance and thought our customers would want to run that on Hyper-V."
"VMware workstation is expensive but with its excellent features and performance for a desktop, the cost is nothing."
"By using a VMware player, I've significantly improved my desktop processing productivity."
"I appreciate the ease of backup and snapshot creation. The ability to revert to previous versions without losing data is very useful for our team."
"The platform’s most valuable feature is snapshot."
"The product works well."
"VMware Workstation is easy to manage and understand."
"We can undo some changes using the snapshot feature."
 

Cons

"When using Cisco VXI in virtual environments there tends to be a lot of bugs with files you have to deploy across the virtual environment. You configure for hours, and then there is a bug that stops you, and you notice that you wasted hours."
"The product is outdated."
"The GUI interface could be improved."
"The tool has limited scalability."
"Customer Service: I think support is an issue for VMware - they only offer support for this product once you purchase more than 10 licenses. This is a show-stopper for smaller organizations like us."
"If you have a big environment with thousands of servers, VMware Player can have problems, and migrations can be extremely slow."
"The problem we are facing with stability is that the network adapter causes crashes of the VM when we're using it for developing purposes."
"VMware Player isn't downgradable, so if you have a later set of VMs, you need to upgrade it or figure out a workaround."
"There are only a few issues with compatibility between various virtualization tools. Moving virtual machines, for example, between VMware and Parallel is a challenge."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is an expensive solution when there are bugs. I'm always ready to give money for a complete solution where there are no bugs in it, but you will never find it."
"VMware Workstation is an expensive solution in Asian countries."
"I use the free version of VMware Workstation."
"The product has a moderate price."
"The tool is not the cheapest."
"You need to pay for a license, but I don't think it costs that much. I think it's a one-time payment."
"VMware Workstation has a high price than competitors in the market."
"The solution is moderately priced. I rate the pricing a six out of ten."
"With a VDI solution, there is always extra cost running a VDI solution but it's not for cost purposes anymore. In the beginning, it was to save money on hardware but at the moment it's other aspects that are more important why you should use a VDI solution."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions are best for your needs.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Comms Service Provider
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business33
Midsize Enterprise14
Large Enterprise18
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
Which VMware solution would you go with - Workstation or vSphere?
VM Workstation’s setup is so easy, you can use it almost instantly, it works well with Windows and Linux. We like VM Workstation primarily to test environments to determine how well a solution will...
What needs improvement with VMware Player?
Here's what happened with us regarding the prices for VMware Workstation: we purchased everything through Dell, and as is common, we got busy and didn't get everything activated. By the time we tri...
What is your primary use case for VMware Player?
I have a bunch of VMware servers set up, including our domain servers, our data servers, and some test machines on VMware. We're not really using VMware Workstation as workstations. We've got a cou...
 

Also Known As

VXI
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Advanced Medical Transport, Artoni Transporti, Calligaris, CIPCO, Citrix, Comcast, Desktone, Electricity Authority of Cyprus, Grupo Industrial Saltillo (GIS), LightEdge, Management Science Associates, Molina Healthcare, North West Redwater, Outscale
Akademiska Hus
Find out what your peers are saying about Citrix, Broadcom, Microsoft and others in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). Updated: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.