Sandboxer vs Lizard

Lizard Sandboxes are Firecracker microVMs with pause, snapshot, live fork, persistent volumes and optional no expiry. Sandboxer is a full Ubuntu VM with Docker and nested KVM on flat plans. Pick Lizard for US and EU regions and live fork; pick Sandboxer for a full machine with agents preinstalled.

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

At a glance

Sandboxer and Lizard compared
Capability	Sandboxer	Lizard
Isolation	microVM Cloud Hypervisor, its own kernel	Firecracker microVM, own kernel
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	Pause, resume, snapshot and restore are available; pausing stops the compute charge.
Fork a sandbox	Copy-on-write disk copy that boots fresh	Copies a running sandbox including memory and processes; returns 409 when a volume is attached.
HTTPS URL per port	Private with a token, or public	Sandboxes open private HTTPS URLs for their ports; a public mode is not stated.
Longest session	No limit on paid plans Auto-stop is up to 30 days or off	no limit if timeoutMs is 0 Set timeoutMs to 0 for no expiry; SDK and CLI default to five minutes.
Billing	Per second, flat rate per size Stopped sandboxes are free	per second while running, including idle Flat hourly price per size: Small 2 vCPU/4 GB $0.0162/h.
GPUs
Self-host or open source
Regions	US East (Virginia) and EU Central (Finland)	US and EU Pricing page lists 'US & EU'; the trial runs in US regions.

= not documented publicly.

Price for one 4 vCPU, 8 GB machine

Sandboxer

$0.036/hour

Flat per-second rate for the default size

Lizard

$0.032/hour

Medium (4 vCPU / 8 GB) flat price $0.0324/h, billed per second

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

Where Lizard is strong

Live fork of a running sandbox with memory and processes.
Persistent volumes at /workspace that outlive a sandbox.
Optional no-expiry sandboxes.
Pro plan of $19/month includes $19 of credits and 2 TB of egress per rolling 30 days.

Where Sandboxer differs

Lizard lists US and EU regions; Sandboxer runs in us-east and eu-central.
Lizard prices by flat size (Medium 4 vCPU / 8 GB is $0.0324/h); Sandboxer's default 4 vCPU / 8 GB is $0.036/h.
Root, Docker and nested virtualization are not documented on the pages read.
Lizard pro concurrency is 100; Sandboxer plans go to 2000.

Pick Lizard if

You need an EU region or a choice of US and EU.
You want live fork of running processes with flat per-size pricing.

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

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