Sandboxer vs Isorun

Isorun is a public-beta sandbox runtime that boots KVM-isolated Linux VMs from any OCI image and supports hibernate, live fork and signed port URLs. Sandboxer runs a full Ubuntu 24.04 VM with systemd, Docker and nested KVM. Pick Isorun for bring-your-own-image sandboxes with live fork; pick Sandboxer for a long-lived full machine.

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

At a glance

Sandboxer and Isorun compared
Capability	Sandboxer	Isorun
Isolation	microVM Cloud Hypervisor, its own kernel	KVM hardware isolation, own guest kernel per sandbox Also default-deny egress and a credential proxy outside the guest.
Full Linux with root	Ubuntu 24.04, sudo, systemd	not stated on the official pages read
Docker inside	Preinstalled	not stated on the official pages read
Nested virtualization (/dev/kvm)		not stated on the official pages read
Pause and resume with memory	Running processes come back	Sandboxes can be hibernated to disk and restored; hibernated sandboxes have no active-runtime charge.
Fork a sandbox	Copy-on-write disk copy that boots fresh	Clones a running sandbox's filesystem, memory and processes.
HTTPS URL per port	Private with a token, or public	sandbox.url(port) returns a signed HTTPS URL; WebSocket and SSE supported.
Longest session	No limit on paid plans Auto-stop is up to 30 days or off	not stated on the official pages read
Billing	Per second, flat rate per size Stopped sandboxes are free	per second, vCPU + RAM $0.025 per vCPU-hour and $0.015 per GiB-hour.
GPUs		not stated on the official pages read
Self-host or open source		partial Page describes a self-hosted sandbox runtime for Claude Managed Agents on your own infrastructure; general self-hosting not documented.
Regions	US East (Virginia) and EU Central (Finland)	not stated on the official pages read

= not documented publicly.

Price for one 4 vCPU, 8 GB machine

Sandboxer

$0.036/hour

Flat per-second rate for the default size

Isorun

$0.22/hour

4 vCPU × $0.025/h + 8 GiB × $0.015/h

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

Where Isorun is strong

Boots from any OCI image from Docker Hub, ghcr or a private registry.
Live fork of a running sandbox including memory and processes.
Default-deny egress, credential proxy and an audit log.
Public beta with $50 free credit and no card required.

Where Sandboxer differs

Isorun starts from a container image you supply, while Sandboxer gives a full Ubuntu 24.04 VM with systemd and Docker preinstalled.
Isorun's fork carries running processes; Sandboxer's fork boots fresh from the latest disk snapshot.
Root, Docker-in-sandbox, nested virtualization, GPUs, regions and maximum session length are not stated on the pages read.

Pick Isorun if

You want to boot a specific OCI image per task and fork a live, running sandbox mid-process.
You want per-sandbox egress policy and an audit log built in.

Pick Sandboxer if

You want a full Ubuntu 24.04 VM with root, systemd, Docker and nested KVM, with Claude Code, Codex and other coding agents preinstalled.
You want stop to save memory and disk so that resume brings running processes back, with stopped sandboxes costing nothing.
You want one flat monthly plan whose dollars come back as machine time, with sandboxes 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. Isorun is a trademark of its owner. Sandboxer is an independent product and is not affiliated with Isorun.

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