Sandboxer vs AWS EC2

EC2 is Amazon's general-purpose virtual machine service: you choose an instance type, an image and networking, and you manage the OS yourself. Sandboxer is a narrower product, a ready-to-use Ubuntu microVM for agents with stop/resume, fork and per-port HTTPS URLs built in. Pick EC2 for production infrastructure, many regions, GPUs and the wider AWS ecosystem; pick Sandboxer when you want an agent sandbox without assembling it.

Checked against AWS EC2's public docs on October 24, 2026. Sources are linked in the table and listed below.

At a glance

Sandboxer and AWS EC2 compared
Capability	Sandboxer	AWS EC2
Isolation	microVM Cloud Hypervisor, its own kernel	Nitro-based virtual machine (virtual EC2 instances; bare metal instances also offered) Nested-virtualization doc describes the Nitro hypervisor and notes bare metal instance types exist.
Full Linux with root	Ubuntu 24.04, sudo, systemd	You connect to the instance and use it as you would a computer in front of you; you manage the OS.
Docker inside	Preinstalled
Nested virtualization (/dev/kvm)		partial Supported on virtual instances in selected families only (M7i/M8i, C7i/C8i, R7i/R8i, X8i, I7i); KVM and Hyper-V as L1 hypervisor; must be enabled; AWS recommends bare metal for performance-sensitive nested work.
Pause and resume with memory	Running processes come back	partial Hibernation saves RAM to the EBS root volume and restores it on start; requires a hibernation-enabled instance. Plain stop discards RAM.
Fork a sandbox	Copy-on-write disk copy that boots fresh
HTTPS URL per port	Private with a token, or public
Longest session	No limit on paid plans Auto-stop is up to 30 days or off	no fixed limit Instances run until stopped or terminated.
Billing	Per second, flat rate per size Stopped sandboxes are free	per second, 1-minute minimum; stopped instances not billed for compute EBS volumes and Elastic IPs keep billing when stopped; hibernated RAM storage is billed as EBS.
GPUs		Accelerated computing families include GPU instances, e.g. G7 with NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs.
Self-host or open source
Regions	US East (Virginia) and EU Central (Finland)	39 AWS Regions (124 Availability Zones) Instance-type availability varies by region.

= not documented publicly.

Price for one 4 vCPU, 8 GB machine

Sandboxer

$0.036/hour

Flat per-second rate for the default size

AWS EC2

$0.18/hour

c7i.xlarge (4 vCPU, 8 GiB), Linux, shared tenancy, on-demand, US East (N. Virginia): $0.1785/h. Storage and data transfer extra.

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

Where AWS EC2 is strong

Many instance families, including nested-virtualization-capable and bare metal types, so you can match hardware to the workload.
Per-second billing with a one-minute minimum, and no compute charge while an instance is stopped.
Hibernation can preserve RAM contents across stop and start on supported configurations.

Where Sandboxer differs

EC2 is a general VM service; you build the image, networking, access and any agent tooling yourself, while Sandboxer ships a preconfigured Ubuntu 24.04 microVM with agents, Docker and an API.
Nested KVM on EC2 is limited to certain instance families and has to be enabled; in Sandboxer /dev/kvm is available in every sandbox.
EC2 has no built-in per-port HTTPS URL or fork primitive in the pages reviewed; those come from other AWS services or your own setup.

Pick AWS EC2 if

You need many regions, GPUs, bare metal or deep integration with other AWS services.
You run production workloads that need AWS-grade networking, IAM and compliance tooling.
You need instance types or sizes beyond Sandboxer's four sizes.

Pick Sandboxer if

You want a sandbox that stops with memory and disk saved and resumes with processes running, with stopped sandboxes costing nothing.
You want Docker, systemd, nested KVM, SSH and coding agents (Claude Code, Codex and others) already installed, with HTTPS URLs for any port, without assembling it yourself.
You want a per-second-billed Ubuntu 24.04 VM driven by a REST API, CLI, MCP server or TypeScript/Python SDK.

Sources

Products change. If something here is out of date, email hello@sandboxer.com and we'll fix it. AWS EC2 is a trademark of its owner. Sandboxer is an independent product and is not affiliated with AWS EC2.

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