VMWare Fusion is free, even if it is a pain in the butt to download. It also has GPU paravirtualization for Linux/Windows which is the only reason I use a proprietary VMM on macOS these days.
Because I was fed up with parallels subscription model and they make me pay for the upgrade the non-subscription version with every new macOS release, I dropped parallels for UTM. I barely need windows, only every other month or so and often just for some small tasks. UTM is nice, but performance running windows is waaay below parallels. It is free, however, so I won't complain.
The performance story doesn't really make sense as both UTM and Parallels use Apple Hypervisor Kit which pretty much is the hypervisor running Windows. It should be identical.
Classic VM solutions like Virtualbox, VMware, Parallels etc. always come with guest tools and driver packages for the guest that have a massive impact on performance. Just because both solutions use the same hypervisor doesn’t mean they perform equally.
Intent looks interesting but the fact that they have their own credits system turns me off of it. I pay $200/mo for Claude Code and that's enough for me; I wish I could use Intent with that.
http://tart.run works great for running macOS (and Linux) VMs on macOS if you're technical. It's free for non-commercial uses too! (Don't think there's GPU acceleration tho).
