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Nerdio 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

Nerdio
Ranking in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
9th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
8.8
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware Workstation
Ranking in Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
3rd
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 August 2026, in the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) category, the mindshare of Nerdio is 3.2%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware Workstation is 9.5%, down from 15.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
VMware Workstation9.5%
Nerdio3.2%
Other87.3%
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
 

Featured Reviews

MB
IT Infrastucture Engineer at PPG
Automation capabilities enhance cost-saving and scaling efforts
The auto-heal functionality needs improvement. Currently, the feature is limited because it only allows one heal condition and doesn't support multiple triggers. The capability to use different conditions, like the presence of online users during a failed installation, is missing. The current state makes it less useful, but I have even submitted a feature request for a better solution.
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 customer service from Nerdio is excellent, and I even know the CEO personally and have a positive experience, rating it nine out of ten."
"The solution is one hundred percent stable and very much straightforward."
"The most valuable features of Nerdio are its automation capabilities, specifically the autoscale and auto-heal functionalities."
"Nerdio is completely an automation platform offering auto-scaling and flexibility."
"It will not harm any of the computer settings to run a specific program. For example, if a program needs a specific security policy, we don't have to use the shared configuration. We have an individual copy of Windows installed on the virtual machine, so anybody can access that. It helps us a lot."
"It's really easy to build testing environments with VMware Player."
"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."
"I like that it's easy to use. It's easy to deploy virtual machines. You have to insert your ISO and the image of your OS and configure it. They provide a step-by-step guide, and you have to follow it. In the end, you have to start the machine, and that's all you have to do. I liked that they synchronized the mouse, keyboard, and everything. When you finish the installation, it directly links to your laptop. This makes copying and pasting things from my laptop inside the virtual machine easy."
"This product is solid and useful for quick test/dev environments."
"The product is really easy to use."
"VMware Player helps you to virtualize and install Ubuntu or any other operating system, even on a Windows laptop."
"This product is pretty straightforward and easy to use, and I would definitely recommend it for testing different scenarios, Windows, Linux, that sort of thing."
 

Cons

"The auto-heal functionality needs improvement."
"They should start providing the certifications on Nerdio for training and enhancements, mainly for the open community of IT."
"The auto-heal functionality needs improvement. Currently, the feature is limited because it only allows one heal condition and doesn't support multiple triggers."
"Lacks the ability to clone onto another system rather than starting from scratch."
"To avoid problems you really do need to be on the most recent version, especially if you want to use W10 images."
"VMware Player should provide a cloud version with no limitations to hardware resources."
"The product could provide the features available in Microsoft Hyper-V."
"Compared to Virtualbox, VMware Player is slightly heavier on resource usage than Virtualbox."
"The solution freezes sometimes."
"They could include official support for macOS virtualization within VMware Workstation."
"I need to buy a newer version of the tool to support Windows Server."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The product is expensive."
"The price of the solution per workstation is approximately 200 Francs annually. We pay a total of 800 francs. Everything is included in the price such as the support."
"With all its support and ease of use, VMware Player's pricing is fair."
"The licensing costs are cheap. I pay approximately $100 per year."
"I use the free version of VMware Workstation."
"The solution's pricing is almost the same as what Google Cloud, AWS, or Microsoft would charge you."
"VMware Workstation is an expensive tool. I rate the product's price a three on a scale of one to ten, where one is a high price, and ten is a low or good price."
"The solution’s pricing is moderate."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Construction Company
9%
Insurance Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
12%
University
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
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

What needs improvement with Nerdio?
They should start providing the certifications on Nerdio for training and enhancements, mainly for the open community of IT. It should not be restricted to partners only, yet available to everyone.
What is your primary use case for Nerdio?
During the implementation and management stage, I use Nerdio Manager for enterprise for deploying and quickly rolling out virtual desktops to end users. Once I complete the production rollout, I st...
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...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

BeMo, Northstar Technologies
Akademiska Hus
Find out what your peers are saying about Nerdio vs. VMware Workstation and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.