Sandboxer vs boxd

boxd provides full hardware-isolated Linux machines with root and Docker that can be forked, snapshotted, checkpointed and hibernated. Hosting is on bare metal in Germany, and boxd can be self-hosted. Pick boxd for EU residency and live fork; pick Sandboxer for preinstalled coding agents and nested KVM.

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

At a glance

Sandboxer and boxd compared
Capability	Sandboxer	boxd
Isolation	microVM Cloud Hypervisor, its own kernel	hardware-isolated Linux machine Forks are a real machine, not a container.
Full Linux with root	Ubuntu 24.04, sudo, systemd	Machines include root and a default user with sudo.
Docker inside	Preinstalled	Machines come with Docker preinstalled.
Nested virtualization (/dev/kvm)		not stated on the official pages read
Pause and resume with memory	Running processes come back	Idle machines hibernate after 4 hours by default and wake with processes intact in about 85 ms.
Fork a sandbox	Copy-on-write disk copy that boots fresh	Copies a running machine, disk included, in under 200 ms.
HTTPS URL per port	Private with a token, or public	Each machine gets an HTTPS subdomain forwarding to ports; custom domains supported.
Longest session	No limit on paid plans Auto-stop is up to 30 days or off	no maximum stated Auto-hibernate after 4 hours idle by default; can be disabled.
Billing	Per second, flat rate per size Stopped sandboxes are free	per second, vCPU + RAM + disk Metered per second and settled every 15 minutes; hibernated machines pay disk only.
GPUs		not stated on the official pages read
Self-host or open source		Can run on your own hardware, datacenter, cloud or country.
Regions	US East (Virginia) and EU Central (Finland)	Germany (bare metal); US region coming

= not documented publicly.

Price for one 4 vCPU, 8 GB machine

Sandboxer

$0.036/hour

Flat per-second rate for the default size

boxd

$0.25/hour

4 vCPU × EUR 0.039/h + 8 GiB × EUR 0.012/h (prices are in euros, excluding VAT; RAM billed on memory in use)

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

Where boxd is strong

Live fork of running machines in under 200 ms.
Hibernate to disk-only billing with fast wake.
Self-hostable and EU-resident.
Egress allowlist and Tailscale integration.

Where Sandboxer differs

boxd is hosted in Germany; Sandboxer runs in us-east and eu-central.
boxd can be self-hosted; Sandboxer cannot.
boxd does not document nested virtualization or GPUs on the pages read; Sandboxer has nested KVM.
Sandboxer preinstalls coding agents and a prompt API; boxd documents agents and integrations separately.

Pick boxd if

You need EU data residency or a self-hosted deployment.
You want live fork of running machines in milliseconds.

Pick Sandboxer if

You want a full Ubuntu 24.04 VM with root, systemd, Docker and nested KVM, with Claude Code, Codex and other coding agents preinstalled.
You want stop to save memory and disk so that resume brings running processes back, with stopped sandboxes costing nothing.
You want one flat monthly plan whose dollars come back as machine time, with sandboxes that can run with no time limit on a paid plan.

Sources

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

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