| Type | Startup | Startup | Startup |
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| In one line | Open-source sandboxes for running AI-generated code. | Elastic sandboxes for running AI-generated code. | Serverless cloud built for AI and agentic compute. |
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| People linkedDiffers | 3 | 3 | 2 |
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| Pros | - +User reportsUses Firecracker microVM isolation; one team building persistent dev machines said it had everything they needed.[1][2]
- +User reportsA common choice for per-session isolation in multi-tenant agent backends, including sandboxes that hold no credentials and sit behind gateways.[1][2]
- +User reportsIts API has become a target others build to: some self-hosted sandboxes advertise E2B compatibility.[1]
- +MetadataApache-2.0 and very actively maintained (about 14.6k stars, commits on 29 Oct 2026).[1]
| - +User reportsA user reports that it can resize a running sandbox without stopping it, unlike Modal.[1]
- +User reportsAgent startups run it in production, including as a fallback provider.[1][2]
- +User reportsSimple per-second pricing per vCPU and per GiB of RAM (users quote $0.0504/h per vCPU and $0.0162/h per GiB).[1]
| - +User reportsSmall conveniences such as filesystem snapshots and images built in code make agent sandboxes easy to set up, according to a user.[1]
- +DocsSupports GPUs in sandboxes and checkpoint/restore on gVisor (per Modal's team on HN; a competitor also calls it the only sandbox provider with GPUs).[1][2]
- +User reportsUsers like its Pythonic decorator API and the $30 of free credits each month.[1][2]
- +User reportsSome teams run thousands of on-demand coding agents a day on it.[1]
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| Cons | - −User reportsOne builder found that managed sandboxes, E2B included, carry a large markup over bare-metal Docker or QEMU and handle long-running agents poorly.[1][2]
- −User reportsA competitor says E2B sandboxes feel less like full VMs and cannot run everything an EC2 instance can.[1]
- −User reportsSwitching sandbox providers is not trivial, so lock-in matters when you choose.[1]
| - −MetadataCore development went private in June 2026, and the public GitHub repo is archived.[1][2]
- −User reportsStrict limits on concurrent resources; one user called their startup credits close to useless until they reached tier 3.[1][2]
- −User reportsPer-second billing adds up for sandboxes left running; one team found even a minimal setup costly at scale and wanted flat-fee pricing.[1][2]
- −User reportsA competitor says its Sysbox-based isolation has problems with low-level workloads.[1]
| - −User reportsResizing means stop, resize, start (about 3 seconds, and running processes are killed), so one user found its autoscaling worse than Daytona's.[1]
- −User reportsIt uses gVisor rather than Firecracker, and gVisor has missing or inaccurate syscalls that you may have to debug.[1][2]
- −User reportsUpstream cloud outages have reached it, as an incident on Modal's status page showed.[1]
- −User reportsA customer's sandbox was the launch point for a rogue-agent hack reported by Reuters (Modal says its platform was not compromised), so you need strict egress rules and permissions.[1]
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| Best for | Agent products that need fast, strongly isolated code execution per session behind a widely supported API. | Teams that want resizable, long-lived agent sandboxes with straightforward per-second pricing. | Python teams that want GPU-capable sandboxes and serverless compute for agents on one platform. |
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| Watch out for | Check session lifetime limits and per-second cost for long-running agents before you commit. | With the open-source repo archived, self-hosting or forking is no longer a realistic exit. | Lock down egress and permissions yourself, and expect gVisor limits for Docker-heavy workloads. |
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