Sandboxer vs Northflank Sandboxes

Northflank Sandboxes run in microVMs on Cloud Hypervisor (gVisor for GPU), support Docker, public ports with TLS, GPUs, and run in your own cloud or on bare metal. Sandboxer differs by offering preinstalled coding agents, nested KVM and plan-based pricing. Pick Northflank for GPUs, BYOC or large scale; pick Sandboxer for agent-ready full VMs.

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

At a glance

Sandboxer and Northflank Sandboxes compared
Capability	Sandboxer	Northflank Sandboxes
Isolation	microVM Cloud Hypervisor, its own kernel	microVM on Cloud Hypervisor (gVisor for GPU sandboxes) Dedicated guest kernel.
Full Linux with root	Ubuntu 24.04, sudo, systemd
Docker inside	Preinstalled	Build images and run containers inside a sandbox.
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	Ports are set individually; public ports get TLS and load balancing.
Longest session	No limit on paid plans Auto-stop is up to 30 days or off	no limit Run until deleted; up to 288 vCPU, 2 TB memory and 64 TB volume per sandbox.
Billing	Per second, flat rate per size Stopped sandboxes are free	per second, CPU + memory Ephemeral storage free; persistent NVMe $0.11657/GiB-month.
GPUs		L4 to B200 on Northflank Cloud or your own GPU nodes, isolated with gVisor.
Self-host or open source		partial Bring your own cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle, bare metal); enterprise control plane can run in your infrastructure including air-gapped.
Regions	US East (Virginia) and EU Central (Finland)

= not documented publicly.

Price for one 4 vCPU, 8 GB machine

Sandboxer

$0.036/hour

Flat per-second rate for the default size

Northflank Sandboxes

$0.13/hour

4 vCPU × $0.01667/vCPU-h + 8 GB × $0.00833/GB-h (ephemeral storage free)

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

Where Northflank Sandboxes is strong

GPU sandboxes from L4 to B200, plus BYOC on your own cloud or bare metal.
Up to 288 vCPU, 2 TB RAM per sandbox and 50,000+ concurrent sandboxes.
No time limit; sandboxes run until deleted.
Published list rates of $0.01667 per vCPU-hour and $0.00833 per GB-hour, billed per second.

Where Sandboxer differs

Northflank has GPUs and Sandboxer has none today.
Northflank can run in your own cloud; Sandboxer is hosted-only, in us-east and eu-central.
Northflank is a general platform with services, jobs and databases; Sandboxer is focused on agent sandboxes with coding agents preinstalled.
Northflank can pause idle sandboxes to stop compute billing but its page does not say whether memory and processes are kept, and it does not document root or nested virtualization; Sandboxer stop saves memory and resume brings processes back.

Pick Northflank Sandboxes if

You need GPUs, BYOC or air-gapped deployment.
You need very large sandboxes or tens of thousands concurrent.
You already run services and databases on Northflank.

Pick Sandboxer if

You want coding agents installed and a prompt API with streamed events.
You need nested KVM and systemd in a full Ubuntu VM.
You want fork from disk snapshots, MCP server and named snapshot templates.

Sources

Products change. If something here is out of date, email hello@sandboxer.com and we'll fix it. Northflank Sandboxes is a trademark of its owner. Sandboxer is an independent product and is not affiliated with Northflank Sandboxes.

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