Choosing an AI agent sandbox in 2026: E2B, Daytona, Modal, Vercel and BoxCompute

Sooner or later an agent needs to run code: a test suite, a scraper, a dev server, a browser. Running that on your laptop or your production server is how one bad command from an agent becomes your outage, so the usual answer is a sandbox, an isolated machine in someone else's cloud.

Five services come up again and again: E2B, Daytona, Modal, Vercel Sandbox and BoxCompute. Their landing pages sound alike. Underneath, they are built for different jobs, and the differences show up in four places: how fast a sandbox starts, what survives when it stops, where it runs, and how the bill works.

We make BoxCompute, so read this with that in mind. Every fact about another provider comes from that provider's own pricing page or documentation, read on 19 October 2026 and linked at the end. Our own start times are measured in production. Where BoxCompute is slower, smaller or more expensive, this post says so.

Two shapes of sandbox

Fast, disposable sandboxes. E2B, Daytona, Modal and Vercel are designed to start in well under a second, run some code, then go away or pause. That suits code interpreters, evaluations, reinforcement learning, and products that start a fresh sandbox for every request. All four have added ways to keep state, such as pausing, snapshots and volumes, but their centre of gravity is speed and scale.

A computer that stays yours. BoxCompute gives an agent a full Linux VM that keeps its disk for as long as you keep the VM. It stops when idle and starts again with the same files and installed packages. It is slower to start, and it is built for agent work that lasts hours or days: a project the agent keeps building, a desktop it uses, a service it keeps running.

The line blurs at the edges. E2B's pause keeps memory as well as disk, and Daytona and Vercel keep the filesystem by default. But once you know which shape your workload has, most of the choice follows.

At a glance

On a narrow screen, the tables scroll sideways.

Start times marked “claimed” are the provider's published figures; we did not benchmark them. Plan names are each provider's own.

Start time: where we are slowest

A new BoxCompute VM takes about 28 seconds to boot. That is the median of 419 new VMs in the 14 days to 19 October 2026, and 90% were ready within 31 seconds. Resuming a stopped VM took about 20 seconds at the median. Once a VM is running, an agent's next command reaches it in under a second.

The others publish sub-second figures: about 80–150 ms for E2B from a snapshot, under 90 ms for Daytona's default containers, under half a second at the median for Modal, and “milliseconds” for Vercel.

The gap is real. Every BoxCompute VM boots its own Linux kernel and operating system, and we don't yet keep a pool of pre-booted VMs. If your product starts thousands of short sandboxes an hour, or a person waits on every start, one of the other four will serve you better today.

If an agent works in the same VM for an hour, half a minute at the start matters less than keeping its files, packages and running services. That is the trade we made.

What survives a stop

“Persistent” means something different on every pricing page, and this is where the providers differ most.

• BoxCompute keeps the whole disk, including /workspace, with no expiry. A VM stops 30 minutes after it was last used, and a stopped VM costs nothing. Running processes end at a stop, and we don't offer snapshots or forks yet. After about 42 hours of continuous uptime, a VM is put to sleep for maintenance even if it is busy.
• E2B pauses a sandbox with its memory as well as its disk, so processes carry on where they were. Paused sandboxes are kept indefinitely and are not billed. A sandbox can run for 1 hour at a time on the free Hobby plan and 24 hours on Pro; pausing resets the clock.
• Daytona keeps the filesystem when a sandbox stops and bills its reserved disk while stopped. Default container sandboxes lose memory at a stop and are archived after 7 days stopped. VM sandboxes can pause with memory intact.
• Modal sandboxes end when their work finishes or they reach their time limit, 24 hours at most. To continue, you snapshot the filesystem and restore it into a new sandbox. Snapshots expire after 30 days by default, and memory snapshots are in alpha.
• Vercel Sandbox snapshots the filesystem automatically when a sandbox stops, and resumes from it. Snapshots expire 30 days after their last use by default, and snapshot storage is billed.

Where it runs

For teams in Southeast Asia, region is often what decides it, because of latency or because of where data may be stored.

• BoxCompute runs in Cyberjaya, Malaysia, and VMs and their files stay there. When the agent works on a task, the prompt and relevant workspace context go to the AI model provider for that task. Malaysia is our only region today.
• E2B offers an APAC region on Google Cloud's asia-southeast1 (Singapore) on Pro and above, enabled through support.
• Daytona's documentation lists shared regions in the United States and Europe.
• Modal lets you pin a sandbox to regions including ap, jp and au, at 1.15× to 1.75× the price. Modal stores sandbox snapshots, logs and images in the United States wherever the sandbox runs.
• Vercel Sandbox runs in 19 regions, including Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Seoul, Osaka and Sydney.

Our Southeast Asia page keeps a longer, sourced list of where sandbox providers run.

Price

Everyone bills by the second, but they don't sell the same sizes. So we priced the closest machine each provider sells to our two VM sizes, running for one hour at list price in the provider's default region, before plan fees, storage, network and tax.

Three things the hourly figures don't show:

• Per vCPU, we cost more. E2B and Daytona both charge $0.0504 per vCPU-hour and $0.0162 per GiB-hour. At those rates our Large would cost about $0.124 an hour rather than $0.15. We come out level at the Large size, and cheaper at the Small one, only because neither sells half a vCPU.
• Vercel bills CPU only while it's busy. An agent that spends most of its time waiting for a model can cost a fraction of the busy figure there. BoxCompute, E2B, Daytona and Modal bill a running sandbox whether it is busy or idle.
• What's included differs. The other prices are compute only: you bring your own agent and pay for its model separately. BoxCompute's price includes the BoxCompute agent, and during early access the agent's AI usage is included too. Free accounts have a daily AI limit.

When BoxCompute is the wrong choice

• You create many short-lived sandboxes, or a person waits on every start.
• You need more than 1.5 vCPU and 3 GiB in one machine, or a GPU.
• You need more than 8 machines running at once. Starter accounts can run up to 8 VMs at a time, and free accounts 3.
• You need to fork, snapshot or restore a running machine.
• You want open-source sandbox software to host yourself. E2B's runtime is Apache-2.0.
• You need a region outside Malaysia today.

When it fits

• An agent works on something for hours or days and needs the same machine tomorrow, with its files, tools, databases and dev servers.
• The agent needs a desktop. The BoxCompute agent asks for control first, then opens Chrome on its VM's desktop, and you can watch live and take over at any time.
• You want an agent included, not only infrastructure. Use the BoxCompute agent in the browser, or connect your own agent through the HTTP API, SDK and CLI or the MCP server.
• Your VMs and files need to stay in Malaysia.

How we checked

• Every fact about another provider comes from the provider's own page, listed below, read on 19 October 2026. Prices and limits change often. If something here is out of date, email [email protected] and we'll correct it.
• Start times for other providers are their published claims. We did not measure them.
• Our boot time runs from when a new VM is created until it reports ready. Our resume time is how long agent runs waited for a stopped VM to come back, across 92 resumes in the same 14 days.
• Prices are list rates for a machine running a full hour, as described above the price table. Vercel's busy share is an assumption, not a measurement; its own pricing examples use 10%.

Sources

• BoxCompute: pricing, VM sandboxes, limits.
• E2B: pricing, plans and limits, persistence, regions, start from a template, isolation, computer use, GPU, open source.
• Daytona: pricing, sandboxes, persistence, isolation, regions, limits, computer use, repository status.
• Modal: pricing, sandboxes, resources and billing, snapshots, isolation, region selection, data residency, start times, computer use example.
• Vercel Sandbox: overview, pricing and limits, concepts, persistence, regions, computer use template.