Sandboxer vs Volcano Engine AgentKit

AgentKit is ByteDance's agent platform, sold as Volcano Engine in China and BytePlus internationally; its sandbox templates run code, browser and terminal tasks in microVMs that live up to 24 hours. Sandboxer gives each sandbox a full Ubuntu 24.04 VM with no time limit on paid plans, stop/resume with memory, and any port as an HTTPS URL. Pick AgentKit for short-lived tool sandboxes inside a wider ByteDance agent stack; pick Sandboxer for long-lived dev machines.

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

At a glance

Sandboxer and Volcano Engine AgentKit compared
Capability	Sandboxer	Volcano Engine AgentKit
Isolation	microVM Cloud Hypervisor, its own kernel	microVM Sandbox templates use microVMs as the foundation.
Full Linux with root	Ubuntu 24.04, sudo, systemd
Docker inside	Preinstalled	Custom templates can be deployed from a custom container image; running Docker inside an instance is not documented.
Nested virtualization (/dev/kvm)
Pause and resume with memory	Running processes come back	partial In-memory context is kept during a session; sleep-to-wake (1-10 s) preserves filesystem state. Docs do not say running processes survive sleep.
Fork a sandbox	Copy-on-write disk copy that boots fresh	partial Manual and automatic snapshots restore an instance's data; each manual snapshot can be restored only once. No fork of a running instance.
HTTPS URL per port	Private with a token, or public
Longest session	No limit on paid plans Auto-stop is up to 30 days or off	24 h per instance Default lifecycle 30 minutes, adjustable up to 86,400 seconds.
Billing	Per second, flat rate per size Stopped sandboxes are free	per second, vCPU + memory Sandbox templates: $0.00000975 per vCPU-second and $0.00000225 per GB-second, plus $0.081/GB outbound traffic.
GPUs
Self-host or open source
Regions	US East (Virginia) and EU Central (Finland)	Asia Pacific (Johor) on BytePlus BytePlus lists ap-southeast-1 (Johor); Volcano Engine's SDK docs show cn-beijing for China.

= not documented publicly.

Price for one 4 vCPU, 8 GB machine

Sandboxer

$0.036/hour

Flat per-second rate for the default size

Volcano Engine AgentKit

$0.20/hour

4 vCPU × $0.00000975/s × 3600 + 8 GB × $0.00000225/s × 3600 = $0.1404 + $0.0648 (BytePlus list price, excluding traffic)

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

Where Volcano Engine AgentKit is strong

Sandbox instances run in microVMs, with a stated 100 ms cold start and up to 120,000 sandboxes created per minute.
Preset templates include an all-in-one browser + terminal + code sandbox and a Code Sandbox with Codex CLI built in.
Bills vCPU and memory per second with flexible vCPU-to-memory ratios.
Snapshots can be taken manually or automatically before an instance expires.

Where Sandboxer differs

AgentKit sandbox instances end after at most 24 hours; Sandboxer sandboxes can run with no time limit on paid plans.
AgentKit sandboxes are tools inside a broader agent-hosting platform (runtime, memory, knowledge, gateways); Sandboxer is a VM product.
AgentKit's international region is Johor; Sandboxer runs in us-east and eu-central.
Sandboxer documents root, Docker, nested KVM and any port as an HTTPS URL; AgentKit's docs don't cover these.

Pick Volcano Engine AgentKit if

You build agents on Volcano Engine or BytePlus and want sandboxes in the same stack.
You need very high sandbox creation rates for short tasks such as agent RL.
Your users are in mainland China or Southeast Asia.

Pick Sandboxer if

You need a sandbox that keeps running for days or weeks.
You need root, Docker and nested KVM in a full Ubuntu VM.
You want to stop and resume with processes still running, and pay nothing while stopped.

Sources

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

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