Windows OS and Mac OS: The two great rivals that have ever existed in this digital world! For years, they are fighting each other, competing over the ground of “who has the best OS.” These two popular OS have their own fan-booth, but there exist some people who exist in the grey area. Some users want to have the bests of both worlds. Now, how can it ever work? Well, simple answer– windows emulators for Mac. What are emulators? Here, in this article, we will introduce with this term.
Table of Contents
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- 10 Best Windows Emulator For Mac
What is Emulators?
If you have already used different OS, you know for a fact that not every OS allows you to run different software or hardware. So, what to do when you want to process software file on an OS which does not allow you to run it? This is where emulators come into the scene. In a nutshell, an emulator is a tool that lets you run software on an OS gadget which in general does not allow you to run it. Thus, an emulator is hardware or software that allows the host computer to behave like a guest computer.
But nowadays, emulators are not only restricted to run any particular type of software system; rather now the advanced emulators let you run a whole different OS while you are running on a different OS. For Mac, emulators can be termed as the grey area because they let window application to run on a Mac and vice versa.
There exist thousands of such advanced windows emulators for Mac app that let window application to run on a Mac OS. They can be paid or free emulators, depending on their features and category. Here, we have prepared a list of best emulators for Mac, both free and paid that can run windows application on a Mac system. Let us have a look.
10 Best Windows Emulator For Mac
1 – Parallels Desktop
Parallels Desktop is a paid emulator which is the best in this field! You can get this emulator at a price of $53.97 on your Mac OS. This emulator allows you to run windows application smoothly on a Mac OS. A perfect and advanced emulator which makes all your windows application behave like a Mac application without any hassles.
Apart from a windows application, this emulator also lets you run Linux and UNIX applications as well. Another great advantage of this emulator is that it allows you to optimise the emulated OS for the primary use of each OS.
However, this emulator has one drawback and that one negative aspect is its advertisement problem. Otherwise, this emulator comes in with a clean slate for the users.
2 – Virtual PC for Mac
Now coming to a free emulator– Virtual PC for Mac. It is a perfect emulator if you are in the experimental mood. You can run any windows based internet applications with the help of this emulator. It is free, so you do not have to worry about the price tag for this emulator. It is a pretty good rough and tough emulator for your Mac to run Windows applications smoothly. However, it has one negative drawback– sometimes the speed of this emulator can drop a little bit.
3 – VMware Fusion
In this list, VMware Fusion surely ranks the second position. It comes along with a tag price of $79.99, but it allows you to run various features which you might not get on other emulators. It is a perfect emulator that allows you to turn any OS smoothly according to your Mac system.
Not only that, but it also provides you to run hardware-accelerated graphics. Thus, with the help of this emulator, you can run any games smoothly. Also, it allows you to run DirectX10 and OpenGL 3.3 etc. And now with the help of its new integrated features, you can run newly introduced touch bar, and it also allows you to run virtual machines as well.
4 – Virtualbox
If you are looking for the best windows emulator that has a free and open source, this window emulator for Mac is the one for you. Coming 4th in the place, this Virtualbox emulator is one of the best emulators for developers and programmers.
It creates virtual machines for Windows, Linux etc. In a nutshell, this emulator is a very professional emulator with many powerful features included in it. Also, if you want you can customise this emulator as well. It frequently updates itself, and it has also increased a list of features as well.
5 – Crossover Mac
In this list, Crossover Mac comes in 5th rank. This emulator is exclusively built only for Mac OS. It is not free, but it comes at a very low price, i.e. $15.95. It has an efficient feature which lets you download windows applications smoothly on Mac operating system. Not only any windows applications, but this emulator allows you to run PC games smoothly on your Mac operating system as well. Also, Crossover Mac does not need any reboot system to run windows programme flawlessly too.
6 – Wineskin Winery
Free and stores hundreds of good features, this window emulator is one of the best in this top 10 list of emulators for windows and mac. It has an exclusive capability to work on older versions of Mac. Wineskin Winery is considered to be one of the best emulators that are free and has such loads of features on it. Mostly, this emulator is used by people for gaming purpose; however, it can be used for non-gaming applications as well. However, one of the drawbacks of this emulator can be an excessive amount of advertisement.
7 – Boot Camp
A perfect emulator for you to download windows applications, this emulator works perfectly as an emulator on Mac operating system. Gaming and non-gaming, every other application can run perfectly with the help of this emulator. Boot camp allows you to install a fully functional Windows OS while you are on the Mac OS. And another advantage of this emulator is that it is the free and open source. It creates a partition for Windows operating system and afterward it adds Mac support software. Boot camp emulator can easily be integrated with Parallels Desktop.
8 – Wine Bottler: Window Emulator
On number 8 on this list of top 10, Wine Bottler surely wins many hearts as an advanced emulator. With many integrated features on it, this emulator is surely one of the best among many others. This emulator makes every other windows application installation procedure simple and straightforward.
It is absolutely free, and it does not have any advertisement issues as well. It also has a special dependency feature which will guide you through every other option securely, and if you have any question, you can get the instant answer from this option as well.
9 – Citrix XenApp
Perhaps this emulator is the most costly emulator in this list of top 10. Worth of $375, this emulator gives you the ability to access to any application on any device whatsoever. It is a great emulator with loads of features tagging along. It can make your windows application run smoothly without any hassle. Also, it can be a perfect choice for gamers too. However, the costly price tag leaves this emulator behind in the list of top 10. Also, this emulator cannot work without internet connection. These two are serious drawbacks of this emulator. Still, if you are looking for a multi-purpose emulator that can work smoothly on any operating system, this application is the best choice despite the price tag.
10 – WinOnx 2 Pro
Last but not the least, WinOnx 2 Pro is a paid emulator that gets featured on the list of top 10. It is the cheapest paid emulator on this list because it only costs $7.99. It is based on Wine, and it has many great features to talk about as well. It can help you install all the windows application easily on your Mac operating system. Also, it can make your windows run smoothly and flawlessly without any issues too. However, it has a few lacks too which brings it down to the end of this list of top 10. The great drawback of this emulator is that it does not allow you to download windows application variety in Mac devices OS X 10.6 and later version. Thus, because of this problem, not many people like to use it. Although it is the cheapest paid emulator and it provides amazing features to the users, it has many backlogs such as advertisement problems etc. Because of these problems, this emulator ends up at the end of this list. However, it is worth a try if you do not have a problem with the backlogs of this emulator.
Also, Read:
Here are the video tutorials of free windows emulator for mac.
Windows Emulator For Mac: Tutorial
Conclusion
These are the top 10 best windows emulators for free and paid a subscription that you can get for your Mac device. You can get paid emulators or free versions according to your purpose and your choice. So, go through their features and get your emulator now to use windows application on your Mac OS device.
Parallels For Mac 10.9.5
System Requirements for Parallels Desktop 16
Supported Mac Configurations
| Minimum To run most applications such as Microsoft Office, accounting, trading, SAP, Matlab, and more. | Best Performance For graphics-intensive applications, high loads, and running multiple virtual machines. | |
|---|---|---|
| Processor | Apple M1 chip, Intel Core 2 Duo, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, Core i9, Intel Core M or Xeon processor | Apple M1 chip, Intel Core i5, Core i7, Core i9 or Xeon processor |
| Memory | 4 GB of RAM | 16 GB of RAM or more |
| Storage | 600 MB for Parallels Desktop application installation Additional disk space for the guest operating system (at least 16 GB is required for Windows 10) | SSD drive |
| Graphics | Apple M1 chip, Intel, AMD Radeon or NVIDIA | Apple M1 chip, AMD Radeon Pro graphics card |
| Operating System | macOS Big Sur 11.1 or newer (when released) macOS Catalina 10.15.7 or newer macOS Mojave 10.14.6 or newer macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 or newer | macOS Big Sur 11.1 or newer (when released) DirectX 11 requires at least macOS Mojave 10.14, but works best on macOS 10.15 Catalina or newer. |
| Internet connection is required for product activation, updates, and select features. | ||
Supported Guest Operating Systems (Mac with Apple M1 chip):
Only ARM versions of operating systems are supported.
- Windows 10 on ARM Insider Preview
- Learn how to install Windows 10 on ARM Insider Preview in this video.
Additional information on the M1 experience may be found in this article. - Windows on ARM can run most of the regular Windows x86 applications. You can download the Parallels Desktop trial and install the application you need. If it doesn't work, let us know at Parallels Forum.
- Learn how to install Windows 10 on ARM Insider Preview in this video.
- Ubuntu 20.10, 20.04
- Fedora Workstation 33-1.2
- Debian GNU/Linux 10.7
- Kali Linux 2021.1
Supported Guest Operating Systems (Mac with Intel processors):
- Windows 10 (recommended)
- Windows 8.1
- Windows 8
- Windows Server 2019
- Windows Server 2016
- Windows Server 2012 R2
- Windows 7 (SP0-SP1)
- Windows Server 2008 R2 (SP0-SP2)
- Windows Vista Home, Business, Ultimate and Enterprise (SP0-SP2)
- Windows Server 2003 R2 (SP0-SP2)
- Windows XP (SP0-SP3)
- Windows 2000 Professional SP4
- Windows 2000 Server SP4
- Boot2Docker
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8,7 and 6
- CentOS Linux 8, 7, 6
- Fedora Linux 33, 32, 31
- Ubuntu 20.10, 20.04, 19.04, 18.04 LTS, 16.04 LTS
- Debian GNU/Linux 10, 9
- Suse Linux Enterprise 15
- OpenSUSE Linux 15.2, 15.1, 15
- Linux Mint 20, 19, 18
- Kali 2020.2, 2019, 2018
- Elementary OS 5
- Manjaro 18
- Mageia 7
- Gentoo Linux **
- Solaris 11, 10 **
- openBSD 6 **
- FreeBSD 12, 11 **
- openVZ 7
- eComStation 2, 1.2 **
- ReactOS 0.4 **
- Android OS *
- macOS Big Sur 11.0 (when released)
- macOS Catalina 10.15
- macOS Mojave 10.14.x
- macOS High Sierra 10.13.x
- macOS Sierra 10.12.x
- OS X El Capitan 10.11.x
- OS X Yosemite 10.10.x
- OS X Mavericks 10.9.x
- OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.x
- OS X Lion 10.7.x
- OS X Lion Server 10.7.x
- Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server 10.6.x
- Mac OS X Leopard Server 10.5.x
- and many more...
- * — Only the version downloaded with help of the Installation Assistant with Parallels Desktop.
** — Parallels Tools are not available for this operating system.
Note: Parallels Desktop for Mac emulates PC hardware, so operating systems that are not present in this list can work as well. You can download the Parallels Desktop trial and install an operating system of your choice. If it doesn't work and you believe it should be supported, let us know at Parallels Forum.
Parallels Tools for Linux require X Window System version 1.15-1.20 and Linux Kernel version 2.6.29-5.5.
Moving Your PC?
Parallels For Mac Os X 10.10.5
PC system requirements to move your PC to your Mac (using Parallels Transporter Agent):
Parallels For Mac 10.10.5
- 700 MHz (or higher) x86 or x64 processor (Intel or AMD)
- 256 MB of RAM
- 50 MB of available hard disk space for installation of Parallels Transporter Agent
- Ethernet or WiFi network adapter for migrating over network
- External USB drive for migrating via external disk
- Supported Windows: Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows 2000 *
- * — To migrate Windows Vista or older, Transporter Agent from Parallels Desktop 13 should be used.
Transporter is not available for Mac with Apple M1 chip.