Sandboxer vs Ellipsis

Ellipsis is a managed agent platform: you define an agent in YAML, and each session runs a harness such as Claude Code or Codex on an isolated cloud machine with spend caps and a recorded transcript. Sandboxer sells the VMs themselves, with SSH, nested KVM and stop/resume that keeps processes. Pick Ellipsis for event-driven agents with budgets and audit trails; pick Sandboxer for long-lived machines you control.

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

At a glance

Sandboxer and Ellipsis compared
Capability	Sandboxer	Ellipsis
Isolation	microVM Cloud Hypervisor, its own kernel	isolated cloud machine (technology not stated) Each session runs on its own isolated cloud machine.
Full Linux with root	Ubuntu 24.04, sudo, systemd	partial Setup scripts run as the sandbox user and can install system packages with sudo.
Docker inside	Preinstalled	Docs show starting services with docker compose up -d --wait in setup hooks.
Nested virtualization (/dev/kvm)
Pause and resume with memory	Running processes come back
Fork a sandbox	Copy-on-write disk copy that boots fresh	Saved setup results keep files and running services for later sessions; no fork of a running session is documented.
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	compute timeout 60 s to 1 h (default 1 h) Environment schema: compute.timeout ranges 60 seconds to 1 hour, default 1h. Docs do not say whether it caps a whole session or each run; sessions can be resumed.
Billing	Per second, flat rate per size Stopped sandboxes are free	per CPU core-hour + GiB-hour while a sandbox runs Organization compute $0.141912 per core-hour and $0.024192 per GiB-hour, including while waiting for your next message; personal compute is free. Prepaid credits with a 10% platform fee.
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

Ellipsis

$0.76/hour

4 vCPU × $0.141912/core-h + 8 GiB × $0.024192/GiB-h = $0.5676 + $0.1935 (organization accounts; personal compute is free)

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

Where Ellipsis is strong

Agents are defined in YAML in your repository and deployed by merging a pull request.
Switches between Claude Code, Codex and Gemini harnesses with one config block.
Sets hard spend limits per session, day, week and month and records every command and tool call.
Compute is free on personal accounts; sizes range from 2 to 32 vCPUs and up to 64 GB.

Where Sandboxer differs

Ellipsis is an agent-orchestration platform triggered by GitHub, Slack, Linear, Sentry or schedules; Sandboxer is VM infrastructure with SSH and an API.
Ellipsis organization compute for 4 vCPU / 8 GiB is about $0.76/h; Sandboxer's 4 vCPU / 8 GB is $0.036/h.
Sandboxer documents memory-keeping stop/resume, nested KVM and per-port URLs; Ellipsis docs don't cover these.

Pick Ellipsis if

You want agents triggered by GitHub, Slack, Linear or Sentry events with budgets and full transcripts.
You want to define and review agent behavior as YAML in your repository.
You're an individual and want free sandbox compute, paying only for model tokens.

Pick Sandboxer if

You need one machine to keep running for hours or days with processes intact.
You want SSH, Docker and nested KVM in a full Ubuntu VM you control.
You want to stop and resume with processes intact and pay nothing while stopped.

Sources

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

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