Sandboxer vs AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda runs your function per invocation in a managed environment, for up to 15 minutes and without state between invocations. Sandboxer provides long-lived full VMs. Pick Lambda for event-driven, stateless code on AWS; pick Sandboxer when an agent needs a persistent machine. AWS also sells a separate product, Lambda MicroVMs.

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

At a glance

Sandboxer and AWS Lambda compared
Capability	Sandboxer	AWS Lambda
Isolation	microVM Cloud Hypervisor, its own kernel	Firecracker microVM execution environment AWS says Firecracker powers Lambda Functions.
Full Linux with root	Ubuntu 24.04, sudo, systemd
Docker inside	Preinstalled	partial Functions can be packaged as container images up to 10 GB; a Docker daemon inside is not described.
Nested virtualization (/dev/kvm)
Pause and resume with memory	Running processes come back	Lambda is designed for short-lived compute that does not retain state between invocations.
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	15 minutes per invocation Up to 90 minutes only for Lambda Managed Instances async/event-source invocations.
Billing	Per second, flat rate per size Stopped sandboxes are free	Per request plus GB-second of duration US East: $0.20 per million requests and $0.0000166667 per GB-second (x86); free tier 1M requests and 400,000 GB-seconds.
GPUs
Self-host or open source		Managed AWS service.
Regions	US East (Virginia) and EU Central (Finland)

= not documented publicly.

Price for one 4 vCPU, 8 GB machine

Sandboxer

$0.036/hour

Flat per-second rate for the default size

AWS Lambda

$0.48/hour

x86, US East (N. Virginia): 8 GB x $0.0000166667/GB-s x 3,600 s of continuous duration; request charges and free tier excluded; 8 GB gives about 4.6 vCPU at 1,769 MB per vCPU

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

Where AWS Lambda is strong

Scales rapidly on demand, with a default of 1,000 concurrent executions and higher on request.
Pay only for invocation duration and requests, with a monthly free tier.
Deep integration with other AWS services and event sources.
Zip or container-image packaging, up to 10 GB for images.

Where Sandboxer differs

Lambda invocations last at most 15 minutes and keep no state between calls; Sandboxer sandboxes can run with no time limit on paid plans.
Lambda runs functions or container images in a managed environment; Sandboxer sandboxes are full Ubuntu VMs with root and systemd.
Lambda has no pause/resume that keeps running processes; Sandboxer stop/resume does.
Lambda is billed per request plus GB-second; Sandboxer bills a flat per-second rate per size.

Pick AWS Lambda if

You run event-driven, stateless code on AWS that fits in 15 minutes.
You want to pay only for execution time with automatic scaling.
Your workload integrates tightly with other AWS services.

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. AWS Lambda is a trademark of its owner. Sandboxer is an independent product and is not affiliated with AWS Lambda.

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