Sandboxer vs Buildkite hosted agents

Buildkite hosted agents are managed, ephemeral build machines for Buildkite Pipelines, with Linux, macOS and Windows shapes billed per vCPU-minute. Sandboxer is not a CI system: its sandboxes persist and can pause with memory saved. Pick Buildkite for pipelines you orchestrate at scale; pick Sandboxer for interactive and agent environments.

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

At a glance

Sandboxer and Buildkite hosted agents compared
Capability	Sandboxer	Buildkite hosted agents
Isolation	microVM Cloud Hypervisor, its own kernel	virtualized environment per job (hypervisor-level isolation per cluster) Linux agents are virtualized and destroyed after each job.
Full Linux with root	Ubuntu 24.04, sudo, systemd
Docker inside	Preinstalled	Default Linux image includes docker, docker-compose and docker-buildx.
Nested virtualization (/dev/kvm)
Pause and resume with memory	Running processes come back	Not offered: CI machines are ephemeral and exist only for the length of a job.
Fork a sandbox	Copy-on-write disk copy that boots fresh	Not offered: CI machines are ephemeral and exist only for the length of a job.
HTTPS URL per port	Private with a token, or public	Not offered for hosted agents.
Longest session	No limit on paid plans Auto-stop is up to 30 days or off	8 h per instance Longer needs a support request.
Billing	Per second, flat rate per size Stopped sandboxes are free	per second, vCPU × runtime Linux $0.004 per vCPU-minute; Mac $0.02.
GPUs
Self-host or open source		partial Self-hosted agents run on your infrastructure; the control plane is SaaS.
Regions	US East (Virginia) and EU Central (Finland)	US East Coast only

= not documented publicly.

Price for one 4 vCPU, 8 GB machine

Sandboxer

$0.036/hour

Flat per-second rate for the default size

Buildkite hosted agents

$0.96/hour

Linux Medium (4 vCPU / 16 GB, not 8 GB) × $0.016/min × 60

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

Where Buildkite hosted agents is strong

Per-second billing with no minimum, on published per-vCPU rates.
Self-hosted agents are a first-class option alongside hosted ones.
Cache volumes on local NVMe persist between jobs at no extra charge.
Linux, macOS (M4) and Windows hosted agents.

Where Sandboxer differs

Buildkite hosted agents are destroyed after each job (up to 8 hours); Sandboxer sandboxes can stop and resume with processes intact.
Hosted agents run in US East only; Sandboxer runs in us-east and eu-central.

Pick Buildkite hosted agents if

You orchestrate CI pipelines at scale and want hybrid hosted and self-hosted agents.
You need macOS or Windows build agents.
You want an established CI vendor with an SLA on Enterprise.

Pick Sandboxer if

Need a long-lived machine you can stop, resume and reach over SSH or an HTTPS URL, not a machine that exists for one job.
Want coding agents preinstalled and a prompt API, MCP server, SDKs and CLI for driving them.
Need Docker, nested KVM and full root in a VM that can stop with memory saved and resume with processes running.

Sources

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

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