Pro is now free. It's a bit of a ball ache to install but neat that they've made it free for personal use:
Never tried VMWare, though some of our customers used it (increasingly they've moved their workloads to the cloud). Used VirtualBox for a while and was happy with that. Used KVM which is really good. Both are free, as well.
I used workstation for my vcenter for years before moving it to Esxi once I upgraded my hosts last year..
I've used VMware, Virtualbox and Hyper-V and found VMware to be the simplest, quickest and less resource hungry. For me the Pro version of VMware doesn't offer that much over the standard player but I've not used it that much just yet. One thing that did confuse was that in the standard version it was easy to select which network adapter to use whereas in Pro it's a more convoluted way which I had to Google to find out how to do. Pro does allow multiple tabbed VMs though but I doubt my little Windows 11 laptop has enough RAM to run loads of Linux VMs at once.