Sandboxer vs Cloudflare Browser Run (Browser Rendering)

Cloudflare Browser Run (formerly Browser Rendering) is a managed headless Chrome service you drive from Workers or REST Quick Actions. It is a browser, not a machine: no shell, Docker or arbitrary ports. Pick it for page rendering and scraping on Workers; pick Sandboxer when agents need a whole Linux VM.

Checked against Cloudflare Browser Run (Browser Rendering)'s public docs on October 24, 2026. Sources are linked in the table and listed below.

At a glance

Sandboxer and Cloudflare Browser Run (Browser Rendering) compared
Capability	Sandboxer	Cloudflare Browser Run (Browser Rendering)
Isolation	microVM Cloud Hypervisor, its own kernel	browser instance Managed headless Chrome instance per session.
Full Linux with root	Ubuntu 24.04, sudo, systemd	Managed browser; no root shell on a general Linux machine.
Docker inside	Preinstalled	Not offered.
Nested virtualization (/dev/kvm)		Not offered.
Pause and resume with memory	Running processes come back	Not stated on official pages.
Fork a sandbox	Copy-on-write disk copy that boots fresh	No fork feature documented.
HTTPS URL per port	Private with a token, or public	Exposes a browser endpoint, not arbitrary ports.
Longest session	No limit on paid plans Auto-stop is up to 30 days or off	60 s idle timeout; keep_alive up to 20 min Sessions also close when Browser Run rolls out a new release.
Billing	Per second, flat rate per size Stopped sandboxes are free	per browser hour plus concurrency Paid: 10 h/month included then $0.09/h; 10 concurrent browsers (monthly average of daily peak) then $2.00 each.
GPUs		No GPUs advertised.
Self-host or open source		Hosted Cloudflare service.
Regions	US East (Virginia) and EU Central (Finland)	Not stated on official pages.

= not documented publicly.

Price for one 4 vCPU, 8 GB machine

Sandboxer

$0.036/hour

Flat per-second rate for the default size

Cloudflare Browser Run (Browser Rendering)

$0.090/hour

1 browser-hour beyond the 10 included at $0.09/h; browsers are not sized by vCPU/RAM, and extra concurrency is $2.00/browser/month

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

Where Cloudflare Browser Run (Browser Rendering) is strong

Billing is per browser hour with 10 hours and 10 concurrent browsers included on the paid plan.
Up to 200 concurrent browsers per account on Workers Paid by default.
Quick Actions REST endpoints give one-call rendering without managing a browser.

Where Sandboxer differs

It is a headless Chrome instance with no shell, root, Docker or nested virtualization.
Sessions idle out after 60 seconds by default and keep_alive extends to 20 minutes; Sandboxer sandboxes can run without a time limit on paid plans.
Tied to Cloudflare Workers and the Cloudflare account.

Pick Cloudflare Browser Run (Browser Rendering) if

You render or scrape pages from Workers and want browsers close to the rest of your Cloudflare stack.
You want very low per-browser-hour pricing with high concurrency.

Pick Sandboxer if

You need a full Ubuntu VM with root, systemd and Docker rather than a browser instance.
You want stop/resume that keeps running processes, or CoW forks of a disk snapshot.
You want coding agents preinstalled and 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. Cloudflare Browser Run (Browser Rendering) is a trademark of its owner. Sandboxer is an independent product and is not affiliated with Cloudflare Browser Run (Browser Rendering).

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