The best hypervisors, according to hackers
16 hypervisors were recommended on Hacker News between November 2025 and November 2026. We rank them by how many separate people recommend each one, and 6 earn the Hacker Approved badge.
Top picks
The three most recommended hypervisors with the badge. Each figure is 25 people. RecommendsCriticizes One comment
Great for homelabs on cheap hardware
A free Debian-based hypervisor for VMs and containers that's easy to install on cheap hardware, with clustering, HA and Ceph built in; setup and networking can feel complex.
Runs VMs and containers under one CLI
People recommend Incus as one tool for VMs, system containers and OCI containers, with a clean CLI and reliable releases, though critics find onboarding and defaults hard.
Smooth move from VMware
Free Linux kernel hypervisor that people trust for VMs, including moving Windows guests from VMware. Critics say its attack surface is large and it has had guest-to-host escape bugs.
All 16 hypervisors, ranked
Select a column heading to sort. Approval share is recommenders out of everyone who gave an opinion; the tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs. Months counts the months, out of 13, in which someone recommended it.
| Rank | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Proxmox VE | 208 | 60 | 78% | 12 | 3 yrs16 owners | Approved |
| 2 | Incus | 90 | 8 | 92% | 12 | 6 mo5 owners | Approved |
| 3 | KVM | 32 | 9 | 78% | 12 | — | Approved |
| Tied 4 | Hyper-V | 17 | 9 | 65% | 9 | — | — |
| Tied 4 | bhyve hypervisor | 17 | 4 | 81% | 8 | — | Approved |
| Tied 4 | Sylve | 17 | 3 | 85% | 6 | — | Approved |
| 7 | Xen hypervisor | 12 | 5 | 71% | 7 | — | Approved |
| 8 | XCP-ng | 9 | 1 | 90% | 5 | — | — |
| Tied 9 | VMware vSphere | 8 | 10 | 44% | 4 | — | — |
| Tied 9 | Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure | 8 | 9 | 47% | 4 | — | — |
| Tied 11 | Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization | 7 | 0 | 100% | 4 | — | — |
| Tied 11 | Proxmox Datacenter Manager | 7 | 1 | 88% | 3 | — | — |
| 13 | Harvester by SUSE | 6 | 1 | 86% | 4 | — | — |
| Tied 14 | Cloud Hypervisor | 5 | 2 | 71% | 5 | — | — |
| Tied 14 | KubeVirt | 5 | 2 | 71% | 3 | — | — |
| Tied 14 | VMware ESXi | 5 | 6 | 45% | 2 | — | — |
How we rank
Rank is the number of separate people who recommend a product in a Hacker News comment over the past year. Someone who praises the same hypervisor in five threads counts once.
The badge goes to hypervisors that at least 10 people recommend, with recommenders outnumbering critics at least 2 to 1, recommended in at least 4 of the 13 months.
Rankings are never for sale. We may earn a commission when you buy through our links. It never changes the order.