Sandboxer vs Archil

Archil offers Firecracker microVM sandboxes whose root filesystem is an Archil disk, plus serverless tool calls and shared object-storage-backed filesystems. It supports memory pause and a roughly 90 ms fork, and BYOC. Pick Archil when storage sharing across sandboxes matters; pick Sandboxer for nested KVM and preinstalled coding agents.

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

At a glance

Sandboxer and Archil compared
Capability	Sandboxer	Archil
Isolation	microVM Cloud Hypervisor, its own kernel	Firecracker microVM with KVM and its own Linux kernel
Full Linux with root	Ubuntu 24.04, sudo, systemd	Runs as root (uid 0) inside the VM; any public or private OCI image.
Docker inside	Preinstalled	Docker, Compose and overlay2 supported; you install the tools and start the daemon.
Nested virtualization (/dev/kvm)		/dev/kvm is unavailable.
Pause and resume with memory	Running processes come back	Pause snapshots memory and disk; resume restores processes. Stop keeps disk but loses memory.
Fork a sandbox	Copy-on-write disk copy that boots fresh	Fork checkpoints the root disk in about 90 ms; a running sandbox is briefly paused.
HTTPS URL per port	Private with a token, or public	Exposed ports are public over TLS with no authentication, or private with an X-Archil-Token header.
Longest session	No limit on paid plans Auto-stop is up to 30 days or off	24 h hard timeout by default (60 s to 24 h); expiry pauses the sandbox Idle timeout is off by default; traffic to an exposed port resumes it.
Billing	Per second, flat rate per size Stopped sandboxes are free	per vCPU-hour and GiB-hour, plus storage and tool calls $0.055/vCPU-h, $0.020/GiB-h; $10/mo Developer minimum, $500/mo Team minimum.
GPUs
Self-host or open source		partial BYOC on AWS, Google Cloud, Azure or bare metal (docs); pricing page lists BYOC under Enterprise.
Regions	US East (Virginia) and EU Central (Finland)	Archil's public AWS regions, plus BYOC

= not documented publicly.

Price for one 4 vCPU, 8 GB machine

Sandboxer

$0.036/hour

Flat per-second rate for the default size

Archil

$0.38/hour

4 vCPU × $0.055/h + 8 GiB × $0.020/h (storage and tool calls excluded)

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

Where Archil is strong

Pause with memory snapshot, and a fork that takes about 90 ms regardless of disk size.
One disk can be mounted by several sandboxes at once (read-only for readers, conditional for writers).
Any public or private OCI image, with 1 to 32 vCPUs and 0.25 to 64 GiB of memory.
BYOC deployments on AWS, Google Cloud, Azure or bare metal.

Where Sandboxer differs

Archil has no nested virtualization; Sandboxer provides /dev/kvm.
Archil sandboxes have a hard timeout of up to 24 h (default 24 h), after which they pause; Sandboxer paid plans can run with no limit.
Archil sandboxes boot from a public or private OCI image you choose (Docker must be in the image); Sandboxer starts as a full Ubuntu 24.04 VM with systemd and Docker preinstalled.
Archil offers multiple AWS regions and BYOC; Sandboxer runs in us-east and eu-central.

Pick Archil if

You need many sandboxes sharing a durable disk or object-storage-backed filesystem.
You need BYOC on your own cloud.
You want to boot from your own OCI image with a fast disk fork.

Pick Sandboxer if

Each Sandboxer sandbox is a full Ubuntu 24.04 VM with its own kernel, root/sudo, systemd and Docker preinstalled.
Stopping saves memory and disk and resume brings running processes back; stopped sandboxes cost nothing.
Coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and others) are preinstalled and driven through a prompt API, with an MCP server, REST API, CLI and TypeScript and Python SDKs.

Sources

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

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