Sandboxer vs Cloudflare Sandbox

Cloudflare Sandbox SDK runs isolated Linux environments on Cloudflare Containers, controlled from Workers code and Durable Objects. It differs from Sandboxer in its edge-platform integration and in that files are deleted when the container stops. Pick Cloudflare if your app already runs on Workers; pick Sandboxer for persistent full VMs.

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

At a glance

Sandboxer and Cloudflare Sandbox compared
Capability	Sandboxer	Cloudflare Sandbox
Isolation	microVM Cloud Hypervisor, its own kernel	microVM per container instance (docs: each instance has its own kernel) Sandbox concept page also calls it a dedicated Linux container.
Full Linux with root	Ubuntu 24.04, sudo, systemd	partial Described as a full Linux environment; root not stated.
Docker inside	Preinstalled
Nested virtualization (/dev/kvm)
Pause and resume with memory	Running processes come back	Sleep stops the container; files are deleted when it stops. Backups can be restored.
Fork a sandbox	Copy-on-write disk copy that boots fresh	Directory backups exist; no fork described.
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	no fixed limit stated Idle sleep after 10 minutes by default; keepAlive option.
Billing	Per second, flat rate per size Stopped sandboxes are free	per 10 ms active; CPU on active use, memory and disk provisioned
GPUs
Self-host or open source
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

Cloudflare Sandbox

$0.36/hour

4 vCPU × $0.00002/s × 3600 + 8 GiB × $0.0000025/s × 3600 (CPU assumed fully active; excludes disk, Workers and Durable Objects charges; no instance type is exactly 4 vCPU/8 GiB)

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

Where Cloudflare Sandbox is strong

Tight integration with Workers, Durable Objects and the Cloudflare network.
Billing at 10 ms granularity, CPU only when active.
Instances scale to idle after inactivity.
Paid Workers plan includes some monthly usage.

Where Sandboxer differs

Sandbox state is lost when the container stops, while Sandboxer saves memory and disk on stop.
Cloudflare sandboxes are controlled through a Worker; Sandboxer is a standalone VM with SSH and REST.
Cloudflare's own pages do not state root, Docker or nested virtualization.

Pick Cloudflare Sandbox if

Your application already runs on Cloudflare Workers.
You want short-lived, event-driven sandboxes billed in 10 ms steps.
You want to stay on a single vendor for edge, storage and compute.

Pick Sandboxer if

Your workload needs a full Ubuntu VM with systemd, Docker preinstalled and nested KVM.
You want coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Pi, Kimi Code, Mistral Vibe) preinstalled and driven through a prompt API.
You want stop/resume that keeps memory and running processes, with sessions 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. Cloudflare Sandbox is a trademark of its owner. Sandboxer is an independent product and is not affiliated with Cloudflare Sandbox.

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