Methodology
Primary sources, one link per number, a date on every row.
Where the data comes from
We read each alternative’s own pricing pages, documentation, status pages, filings and press releases, plus named industry reports. Every record lists its sources with the date we accessed them, and every number in the table links to the source it came from.
How the E2B comparison works
E2B is the baseline. Its own record sits in the data with its own sources, and every alternative page puts E2B’s value next to the alternative’s for the same field: price, isolation, cold start, session limit, persistence, self-hosting and SDKs.
Price per hour is one 2 vCPU / 4 GiB sandbox: 2 × the vendor’s published vCPU rate plus 4 × its published memory rate, at default-region on-demand list prices. Per-second rates are multiplied by 3,600. Vendors that bill only active CPU (Vercel, Cloudflare, Upstash, Tensorlake, AWS AgentCore) cost less than this figure for agents that idle. Self-hosted software has no hourly price. The percentage shown is that price divided by E2B’s, rounded.
Cold start figures are the vendor’s own published claims with their conditions, not our benchmarks. Isolation is the boundary the vendor states: a microVM or VM gives each sandbox its own kernel, gVisor intercepts system calls in user space, and a container shares the host kernel.
The “pick instead” and “stay on E2B” lines on each page are generated from the fields in this dataset and nothing else. There is no ranking and no score.
How we verify
Each row shows the date we last checked it. A field is filled only when a source states it; when a alternative does not publish a figure, the cell stays empty. List prices are the public, on-demand prices; negotiated and committed-use discounts are not shown.
Corrections
Vendors and readers can send corrections to hello@e2balternatives.com with a public source. We update the row and its verified date. Featured placement is paid and labelled; it never changes a row’s data or its position in the sorted table.
Reuse
The dataset is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with a link to e2balternatives.com. Download it as CSV or JSON.
Field definitions
33 fields- Isolation
- Isolation technology the vendor states for each sandbox.
- Other isolation options
- Alternative runtimes the vendor offers besides the default (e.g. VM runtime, gVisor for GPU).
- Deployment
- Managed cloud service, self-hosted software, or both.
- Billing basis
- What the meter counts: wall-clock allocated resources, active CPU only, requests/plan quota, session-hours, or free software.
- vCPU price $/vCPU-hr
- Published on-demand CPU rate normalised to USD per vCPU-hour (per-second rates multiplied by 3,600; per-core rates divided by vCPUs per core where the vendor defines it). Lowest public tier, default region. 0 means the vendor states no separate CPU charge.
- Memory price $/GiB-hr
- Published memory rate normalised to USD per GiB-hour (GB treated as GiB where the vendor does not distinguish). 0 means the vendor states memory is free.
- Sandbox from $/sandbox-hr
- Smallest published per-sandbox hourly price, where the vendor publishes one.
- Paid plan from $/mo
- Cheapest paid platform plan fee (before usage).
- Free tier
- A free plan, free monthly allowance or sign-up credit exists.
- Free tier detail
- What the free tier or credit includes, as published.
- Cold start ms
- Vendor-published create/boot time in milliseconds (a vendor claim, not our benchmark). Only filled when the vendor publishes a number; see startup_claim for percentile and conditions.
- Resume time ms
- Vendor-published resume-from-pause/standby/snapshot time in milliseconds.
- Startup claim
- The vendor's startup/resume wording with conditions, quoted or closely paraphrased.
- Max session length
- Longest single sandbox session by plan, as published.
- Persistence / snapshots
- Filesystem state can be kept between runs (snapshots, persistent disks, volumes).
- Pause / resume
- A sandbox can be paused, suspended, hibernated or put in standby and resumed later.
- Memory state kept
- Pause/hibernate preserves running memory state, not only the filesystem.
- Fork / branch
- A running or snapshotted sandbox can be cloned into new sandboxes.
- GPU
- GPU sandboxes are offered.
- Self-host
- Can run on your own hardware or cluster (open source or licensed).
- BYOC / VPC
- Vendor-managed deployment inside your own cloud account.
- Open source
- Core sandbox runtime is published under an open-source licence.
- Licence
- Open-source licence of the runtime, if any.
- SDKs / languages
- Official SDK languages (or supported execution languages where noted).
- Regions
- Published regions or region count.
- Max vCPU per sandbox vCPU
- Largest published vCPU count per sandbox on any self-serve or enterprise plan.
- Max memory per sandbox GiB
- Largest published memory per sandbox.
- Concurrency
- Published concurrent sandbox limits by plan.
- SOC 2
- SOC 2 status as stated by the vendor.
- HIPAA
- Vendor offers HIPAA-compliant usage/BAA (on any plan).
- 2 vCPU + 4 GiB per hour $/hr
- Hourly list price of one 2 vCPU / 4 GiB sandbox: 2 x the vCPU rate + 4 x the memory rate, from the two published rates. Left empty for self-hosted software and for vendors without both rates. Vendors that bill CPU only while busy (Vercel, Cloudflare, Upstash, Tensorlake, AWS AgentCore) cost less for idle agents than this shows.
- Price vs E2B x E2B
- The 2 vCPU + 4 GiB hourly price divided by E2B's own ($0.1656 at $0.000014/vCPU-s and $0.0000045/GiB-s). Under 1 is cheaper than E2B.
- Status
- Preview, experimental, beta, sunset or self-hosting caveats the vendor documents.