Sandboxer vs Azure Virtual Machines

Azure Virtual Machines is Microsoft's general-purpose VM service: you choose a size and image and manage the OS yourself. Sandboxer is a preconfigured Ubuntu microVM for agents with stop/resume, fork and per-port URLs. Pick Azure when you need Microsoft ecosystem integration, Windows, GPUs or many regions; pick Sandboxer when you want a ready agent sandbox.

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

At a glance

Sandboxer and Azure Virtual Machines compared
Capability	Sandboxer	Azure Virtual Machines
Isolation	microVM Cloud Hypervisor, its own kernel	virtual machine Described as virtualization without buying hardware; hypervisor not named on the overview page.
Full Linux with root	Ubuntu 24.04, sudo, systemd	Microsoft describes VMs as giving more control over the environment; you configure and patch the OS yourself.
Docker inside	Preinstalled
Nested virtualization (/dev/kvm)		partial Microsoft documents nested Hyper-V in Azure VMs; non-Microsoft hypervisors on Hyper-V are described as not tested or supported.
Pause and resume with memory	Running processes come back	partial Hibernation stores memory on the OS disk and resumes running processes; limited to certain v5 series up to 64 GB RAM and some GPU series, not Spot or Uniform scale sets.
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
Billing	Per second, flat rate per size Stopped sandboxes are free	per minute by VM size; deallocated and hibernated VMs not billed for compute Disks and networking keep billing.
GPUs		GPU series such as NVv4 and NVadsA10v5 are listed.
Self-host or open source
Regions	US East (Virginia) and EU Central (Finland)	multiple geographic regions worldwide Region count not stated on the pages read.

= not documented publicly.

Price for one 4 vCPU, 8 GB machine

Sandboxer

$0.036/hour

Flat per-second rate for the default size

Azure Virtual Machines

$0.17/hour

Standard F4s v2 (4 vCPU, 8 GiB), Linux, pay-as-you-go, East US: $0.169/h (Azure retail prices API). For comparison Standard D4s v5 (4 vCPU, 16 GiB, 8 GiB more than the reference) is $0.192/h. OS disk and bandwidth extra.

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

Where Azure Virtual Machines is strong

Wide range of VM series, including GPU sizes and Windows images.
Hibernation can preserve memory and processes on supported sizes.
Availability Zones and scale sets give a 99.99% SLA when deployed across two or more zones.

Where Sandboxer differs

Azure VMs are a general platform you assemble; Sandboxer is a preconfigured Ubuntu 24.04 microVM with coding agents, Docker and an API.
Azure bills by the minute; Sandboxer bills per second.
Azure nested virtualization is documented for Hyper-V, not for KVM guests; Sandboxer exposes /dev/kvm in every sandbox.

Pick Azure Virtual Machines if

You need Windows, GPUs, enterprise networking or Microsoft ecosystem integration.
You need availability zones, SLAs and compliance certifications.
You want a broader range of sizes and regions.

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. Azure Virtual Machines is a trademark of its owner. Sandboxer is an independent product and is not affiliated with Azure Virtual Machines.

Other comparisons

Sandboxer vs E2B

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

Compare

Sandboxer vs Daytona

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

Compare

Sandboxer vs Modal

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

Compare

Sandboxer vs Vercel Sandbox

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

Compare

All 169 comparisons