Sandboxer vs Firecrawl

Firecrawl is a web data API (scrape, crawl, map, search) that also offers a browser sandbox where you run Playwright code in Node, Python or Bash. It is not a general VM. Pick it for turning sites into LLM-ready data; pick Sandboxer for full environments.

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

At a glance

Sandboxer and Firecrawl compared
Capability	Sandboxer	Firecrawl
Isolation	microVM Cloud Hypervisor, its own kernel	browser sandbox Each session runs in an isolated, disposable or persistent sandbox; filesystem is ephemeral.
Full Linux with root	Ubuntu 24.04, sudo, systemd	Not mentioned on the docs page read.
Docker inside	Preinstalled	Not mentioned on the docs page read.
Nested virtualization (/dev/kvm)		Not mentioned on the docs page read.
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	Not mentioned on the docs page read.
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	up to 1 h (ttl 30-3600 s, default 10 min) Inactivity timeout 10-3600 s, default 300.
Billing	Per second, flat rate per size Stopped sandboxes are free	credits per browser minute 2 credits/min for Playwright code only, 7 with a prompt; 1-minute minimum. Standard $99/mo (monthly) for 100,000 credits.
GPUs		Not mentioned on the docs page read.
Self-host or open source		Pricing page does not mention it.
Regions	US East (Virginia) and EU Central (Finland)	US default; other countries via location.country

= not documented publicly.

Price for one 4 vCPU, 8 GB machine

Sandboxer

$0.036/hour

Flat per-second rate for the default size

Firecrawl

$0.12/hour

2 credits/min × 60 = 120 credits/h × $0.00099 (Standard $99 / 100,000 credits)

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

Where Firecrawl is strong

Scrape, crawl, map and search endpoints return LLM-ready data from one API.
Browser sandbox runs Playwright in Node/Python plus Bash with agent-browser preinstalled.
Plans from free to Scale with up to 100 concurrent browsers.

Where Sandboxer differs

The sandbox is a browser environment that runs Playwright, Python, Node or Bash, not a documented root VM; downloaded files are lost when the session ends.
Sessions max out at one hour.
Credits are shared with scraping and billed per browser minute.

Pick Firecrawl if

You need clean web data extraction at scale with crawl and search.
You want a quick browser-plus-code session for an agent without managing infrastructure.

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. Firecrawl is a trademark of its owner. Sandboxer is an independent product and is not affiliated with Firecrawl.

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