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Sandboxer vs GitLab.com hosted runners

GitLab.com hosted runners are newly provisioned, ephemeral VMs that run your GitLab CI/CD jobs, counted against monthly compute minutes by plan. Sandboxer is not CI: sandboxes persist and can pause with memory saved. Pick GitLab runners for pipelines in GitLab; pick Sandboxer for agent and dev environments.

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

At a glance

Sandboxer and GitLab.com hosted runners compared
CapabilitySandboxerGitLab.com hosted runners
IsolationmicroVM
Cloud Hypervisor, its own kernel
fresh VM per job
Jobs run on a VM that is discarded afterward.
Full Linux with root
Ubuntu 24.04, sudo, systemd
Docker inside
Preinstalled
saas-linux runners run privileged, so Docker-in-Docker works.
Nested virtualization (/dev/kvm)
Pause and resume with memory
Running processes come back
Fork a sandbox
Copy-on-write disk copy that boots fresh
HTTPS URL per port
Private with a token, or public
Longest sessionNo limit on paid plans
Auto-stop is up to 30 days or off
project job timeout
Runner timeout can't be overridden on hosted runners; default not found.
BillingPer second, flat rate per size
Stopped sandboxes are free
compute minutes included per plan
Free 400, Premium 10,000 per month; extra $10 per 1,000 minutes.
GPUs
Self-host or open sourcepartial
Bring-your-own runners are unlimited and use no compute minutes.
RegionsUS East (Virginia) and EU Central (Finland)US (us-east1, us-east5; Arm in us-central1)

= not documented publicly.

Where GitLab.com hosted runners is strong

  • Fresh VM per job with privileged mode for Docker builds.
  • Sizes from 2 vCPU / 8 GB to 32 vCPU / 128 GB, x86-64 and Arm.
  • Bring-your-own runners are free of compute-minute charges.
  • Free tier includes 400 compute minutes a month.

Where Sandboxer differs

  • GitLab runners are discarded after each job; Sandboxer sandboxes persist and can resume with processes running.
  • Minutes are metered per plan and size, with no per-hour list price; Sandboxer lists hourly prices per size.
  • GitLab hosted runners run in US regions only on the documented list; Sandboxer runs in us-east and eu-central.

Pick GitLab.com hosted runners if

  • Your repositories and pipelines already live in GitLab.
  • You want bundled plan minutes and self-managed runners.

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. GitLab.com hosted runners is a trademark of its owner. Sandboxer is an independent product and is not affiliated with GitLab.com hosted runners.

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