Sandboxer vs Lightpanda Cloud

Lightpanda is a from-scratch headless browser for machines, with a hosted option where you point Puppeteer or Playwright at a WebSocket endpoint and choose Lightpanda or Chrome. It is a browser, not a VM. Pick it for light, fast crawling; pick Sandboxer for full environments.

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

At a glance

Sandboxer and Lightpanda Cloud compared
Capability	Sandboxer	Lightpanda Cloud
Isolation	microVM Cloud Hypervisor, its own kernel	browser instance Hosted Lightpanda or Chrome session.
Full Linux with root	Ubuntu 24.04, sudo, systemd	Managed browser; no root shell on a general Linux machine.
Docker inside	Preinstalled	Not offered.
Nested virtualization (/dev/kvm)		Not offered.
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	No fork feature documented.
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	Only concurrency caps are listed.
Billing	Per second, flat rate per size Stopped sandboxes are free	monthly plan with browser hours Explorer free 10 h; Builder $19/mo with 300 h then $0.08/h.
GPUs		No GPUs advertised.
Self-host or open source		Browser code is open on GitHub (lightpanda-io/browser); Enterprise offers on-premise/private cloud.
Regions	US East (Virginia) and EU Central (Finland)	Sample endpoint uses euwest; no list.

= not documented publicly.

Price for one 4 vCPU, 8 GB machine

Sandboxer

$0.036/hour

Flat per-second rate for the default size

Lightpanda Cloud

$0.080/hour

1 extra browser-hour on Builder at $0.08/h; not sized by vCPU/RAM

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

Where Lightpanda Cloud is strong

Open-source browser you can run yourself, with a hosted option.
Cloud lets you pick Lightpanda or Chrome behind the same endpoint.
Free tier of 10 hours and cheap Builder plan with 30 concurrent sessions.

Where Sandboxer differs

Browser only: no root, Docker, nested KVM or port URLs.
Lightpanda does not render graphics, so some pages may behave differently.
Proxies are bring-your-own on listed plans.

Pick Lightpanda Cloud if

You crawl at scale and want low memory and fast execution.
You want an open-source browser you can also self-host.

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

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