Sandboxer vs Specific
Specific is an app platform for coding agents: infrastructure is declared in a specific.hcl file and shipped with specific deploy to services, Postgres, storage and cron jobs on its cloud. It runs your application, not a general-purpose machine you log into, so it differs from Sandboxer's full-VM sandboxes. Pick Specific to host and preview an agent-built app; pick Sandboxer when the agent needs a machine to work in.
Checked against Specific's public docs on October 24, 2026. Sources are linked in the table and listed below.
At a glance
= not documented publicly.
Price for one 4 vCPU, 8 GB machine
List prices from each provider's pricing page, before free credits, plans and storage. This compares price only.
Where Specific is strong
- It defines services, Postgres (Neon), S3-compatible object storage (Tigris), Redis, cron and Temporal workflows in one config file.
- specific dev runs the whole system locally and the CLI is free without an account.
- Preview environments per pull request branch the data copy-on-write.
- Production-sensitive actions such as scaling and secrets stay with humans in the dashboard.
Where Sandboxer differs
- Specific deploys and hosts an application; Sandboxer provides a general-purpose VM an agent can work in.
- Specific has no stated root shell, systemd or nested virtualisation; Sandboxer sandboxes have all three.
- Specific runs in one AWS region (Frankfurt) today; Sandboxer runs in us-east and eu-central.
- Specific includes managed databases and previews; Sandboxer has no managed database product.
Pick Specific if
- You want to ship an agent-built app with managed Postgres, storage and preview environments.
- You want infrastructure defined as reviewable config that an agent can validate with specific check.
- You need bring-your-own-cloud on an enterprise plan.
Pick Sandboxer if
- You need a full Ubuntu VM with root, systemd and Docker inside a microVM with its own kernel.
- You want stop/resume that keeps running processes and memory, and forks from disk snapshots.
- You want coding agents (Claude Code, Codex and others) preinstalled and driven through a prompt API.
Sources
Products change. If something here is out of date, email hello@sandboxer.com and we'll fix it. Specific is a trademark of its owner. Sandboxer is an independent product and is not affiliated with Specific.
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