Sandboxer vs Amika

Amika runs coding agents in isolated VMs (devboxes/rigs) on your own machines, your cloud accounts or Amika-hosted compute, with private HTTPS preview URLs. The core is open source and hosted compute bills per second ($0.1008/vCPU-hour, $0.0324/GiB-hour). Pick Amika to run agent VMs on your own hardware or cloud; pick Sandboxer for a managed full Ubuntu VM with root, Docker and nested KVM.

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

At a glance

Sandboxer and Amika compared
Capability	Sandboxer	Amika
Isolation	microVM Cloud Hypervisor, its own kernel	VM per agent (technology not stated) Site cites VM-level isolation instead of shared-kernel containers.
Full Linux with root	Ubuntu 24.04, sudo, systemd	Not stated on the official pages checked.
Docker inside	Preinstalled	Not stated on the official pages checked.
Nested virtualization (/dev/kvm)		Not stated on the official pages checked.
Pause and resume with memory	Running processes come back	Not stated on the official pages checked.
Fork a sandbox	Copy-on-write disk copy that boots fresh	Not stated on the official pages checked.
HTTPS URL per port	Private with a token, or public	VMs can expose a private HTTPS preview URL.
Longest session	No limit on paid plans Auto-stop is up to 30 days or off	Rigs can be short-lived or persistent.
Billing	Per second, flat rate per size Stopped sandboxes are free	hosted compute per second: vCPU $0.1008/h, memory $0.0324/GiB-h, storage $0.00216/GiB-h Own machines never metered; LLM tokens not charged.
GPUs		partial Site mentions running GPU evals on GPU hosts in the 'own machines or own cloud' section.
Self-host or open source		Open-source core; run on your own machines or cloud accounts.
Regions	US East (Virginia) and EU Central (Finland)	Not stated on the official pages checked.

= not documented publicly.

Price for one 4 vCPU, 8 GB machine

Sandboxer

$0.036/hour

Flat per-second rate for the default size

Amika

$0.66/hour

4 vCPU × $0.1008/h + 8 GiB × $0.0324/h (storage extra at $0.00216/GiB-h)

List prices from each provider's pricing page, before free credits, plans and storage. This compares price only.

Where Amika is strong

Run on your own hardware, your VPC cloud accounts, or hosted by Amika.
Open-source core under Apache 2.0 (CLI, in-VM daemon, VM images and a TypeScript SDK).
Free plan for up to 3 active users with $50 starting credits.
Can connect other sandbox providers such as Daytona and E2B.

Where Sandboxer differs

Amika can run on hardware or cloud accounts you supply as well as on Amika-hosted compute; Sandboxer is a single managed region.
Amika's hosted compute is priced per vCPU and per GiB; Sandboxer sizes have fixed hourly prices.
Amika's pages checked don't document root, Docker, nested KVM or pause/resume; Sandboxer documents them.

Pick Amika if

You want to run agent VMs on your own Mac Mini, desktop or cloud account.
You want an open-source core and per-user team pricing ($30/active user).
You want to combine multiple sandbox providers under one tool.

Pick Sandboxer if

Sandboxer gives each sandbox a full Ubuntu 24.04 VM with root, systemd and Docker preinstalled.
Sandboxer stop/resume keeps memory and running processes.
Sandboxer exposes any port as an HTTPS URL and bundles Claude Code, Codex and other coding agents.

Sources

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

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Sandboxer vs E2B

Firecracker microVMs with memory-preserving pause and fork, and an open-source stack.

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Sandboxer vs Daytona

Many sandbox classes, from containers to VMs, Windows and GPUs.

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Sandboxer vs Modal

Massive scale and GPUs for short-lived sandboxes, gVisor by default.

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Sandboxer vs Vercel Sandbox

Firecracker microVMs billed on active CPU, inside the Vercel platform.

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