Sandboxer vs Alibaba Cloud ACK

ACK is a managed Kubernetes control plane; you run containers on ECS, bare-metal, GPU or serverless (ECI) nodes. It is a platform to build a sandbox system on, not a sandbox product. Pick ACK for orchestrating containerised workloads on Alibaba Cloud; pick Sandboxer for disposable full VMs.

Checked against Alibaba Cloud ACK's public docs on October 24, 2026. Sources are linked in the table and listed below.

At a glance

Sandboxer and Alibaba Cloud ACK compared
Capability	Sandboxer	Alibaba Cloud ACK
Isolation	microVM Cloud Hypervisor, its own kernel	Containers on ECS nodes; optional sandboxed containers (lightweight VMs with dedicated kernels)
Full Linux with root	Ubuntu 24.04, sudo, systemd
Docker inside	Preinstalled	partial Runs container workloads through Kubernetes; running a Docker daemon inside is not described.
Nested virtualization (/dev/kvm)
Pause and resume with memory	Running processes come back
Fork a sandbox	Copy-on-write disk copy that boots fresh
HTTPS URL per port	Private with a token, or public	partial Ingress is supported; you configure routing yourself.
Longest session	No limit on paid plans Auto-stop is up to 30 days or off	Persistent cluster, no session limit
Billing	Per second, flat rate per size Stopped sandboxes are free	Pro cluster fee per hour plus underlying resources Pro: USD 0.09 per cluster per hour (may vary by region); Basic has no management fee; ECS, load balancers and EIPs billed separately.
GPUs		GPU-accelerated instances are supported.
Self-host or open source		partial Manages on-premises and multi-cloud clusters from one control point; the service itself is not self-hostable.
Regions	US East (Virginia) and EU Central (Finland)	Region list is on a separate page.

= not documented publicly.

Where Alibaba Cloud ACK is strong

Managed, highly available Kubernetes control plane with Basic and Pro tiers (Pro has an SLA).
Several node types: ECS, bare metal, GPU, sandboxed containers and serverless via ECI.
Integrated networking, storage, monitoring and security services in the Alibaba Cloud ecosystem.
Multi-cluster management including on-premises and multi-cloud clusters.

Where Sandboxer differs

ACK is Kubernetes infrastructure, so you build sandbox lifecycle (create, stop, resume) yourself; Sandboxer provides it by API.
ACK workloads are containers, while each Sandboxer sandbox is a full VM with its own kernel.
ACK bills cluster fees plus per-resource ECS costs; Sandboxer bills a flat per-second size price.
ACK offers GPU nodes; Sandboxer has no GPUs.

Pick Alibaba Cloud ACK if

You run Kubernetes workloads on Alibaba Cloud.
You need GPU nodes, bare-metal nodes or multi-cluster management.
You already operate Kubernetes and want sandboxed containers inside it.

Pick Sandboxer if

You want a full Ubuntu 24.04 VM with its own kernel, root/sudo, systemd and Docker preinstalled, and nested KVM (/dev/kvm).
You want to stop a sandbox and resume it with running processes back, with stopped sandboxes costing nothing.
You want coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and others) preinstalled, driven through a prompt API with streamed events, plus any port exposed as an HTTPS URL.

Sources

Products change. If something here is out of date, email hello@sandboxer.com and we'll fix it. Alibaba Cloud ACK is a trademark of its owner. Sandboxer is an independent product and is not affiliated with Alibaba Cloud ACK.

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