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Sandboxer vs Ona

Ona provisions each environment as an isolated VM from a Dev Container config, either on Ona Cloud or in your AWS or GCP VPC. Its docs say new customer signup is closed, and new Core subscriptions are unavailable. Pick Ona for enterprise VPC deployment; pick Sandboxer for a self-serve sandbox you can start today. Ona's site describes it as part of OpenAI.

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

At a glance

Sandboxer and Ona compared
CapabilitySandboxerOna
IsolationmicroVM
Cloud Hypervisor, its own kernel
VM per environment
Dedicated compute, storage and networking.
Full Linux with root
Ubuntu 24.04, sudo, systemd
Docker inside
Preinstalled
partial
Environments are defined with Dev Containers; Docker use not detailed.
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
BillingPer second, flat rate per size
Stopped sandboxes are free
OCU credits (e.g. 1 OCU/hour for 4 vCPU / 16 GB on Core)
OCUs are consumed while environments run; the Standard 4 vCPU / 16 GB class is 1 OCU/hour.
GPUspartial
A GPU-accelerated class (16 vCPU / 64 GB) is listed at 7 OCU/hour.
Self-host or open sourcepartial
Runners can run in your own VPC (AWS or GCP per the docs home) or on Ona Cloud; the management plane is Ona's.
RegionsUS East (Virginia) and EU Central (Finland)

= not documented publicly.

Where Ona is strong

  • Runners can run in your own VPC with network control, or on Ona Cloud.
  • Dev Container based prebuilds start environments in seconds.
  • Environments are defined as code with Dev Containers.
  • Admin controls include org-wide command deny lists and a kernel-level executable control (Veto).

Where Sandboxer differs

  • Ona docs say new customer signup is closed; Sandboxer is self-serve.
  • Ona environments are ephemeral by design; Sandboxer stop keeps memory and processes.
  • Ona has VPC runners; Sandboxer is a single hosted region.
  • Pricing is in OCUs, not machine-seconds.

Pick Ona if

  • You need runners inside your own AWS or GCP VPC.
  • You want org-wide guardrails and Dev Container standardisation.
  • You already are an Ona customer.

Pick Sandboxer if

  • You need a full Ubuntu 24.04 VM with root, systemd, Docker and nested KVM, with agents like Claude Code and Codex preinstalled.
  • You want stop to save memory and disk and resume to bring processes back, with stopped sandboxes costing nothing.
  • You want a REST API, CLI, TypeScript and Python SDKs, and an MCP server on per-second billing.

Sources

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

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