Tangle vs E2B, Daytona, Modal and 9 more: which sandbox for coding agents?
Each page says when to pick the rival and when to pick Tangle, and links every rival fact to the rival's own page. Pick Tangle when your coding agent should run in the sandbox with no model key of your own and return its result, usage and cost from one call.
Last checked November 10, 2026: each rival fact links the page it came from, read that day.
Tangle vs E2B
Pick E2B for a Firecracker microVM per session, sandboxes in your own AWS, GCP or Azure account, and memory kept across pause. Pick Tangle when the coding agent should need no model key, return its result, usage and cost from one prompt call, and stop at a fleet budget you set in dollars.
Tangle vs Daytona
Pick Daytona for Windows and macOS desktops, GPU sandboxes, five SDK languages and compute in your own cloud. Pick Tangle for eight installed coding agents, one prompt call per task, and sandboxes, models and traces on one key.
Tangle vs Modal
Pick Modal for GPU sandboxes, million-sandbox bursts, and inference and training on the same platform. Pick Tangle for eight coding agents, installed in every sandbox and needing no model key, and sandboxes that stop and resume with their files.
Tangle vs Vercel Sandbox
Pick Vercel Sandbox for Firecracker microVMs in 19 regions, an egress firewall that injects credentials, and persistence on by default. Pick Tangle when you want OpenClaw, Kimi Code or Prime Agent installed in every sandbox, and one prompt call that returns the agent's result, usage and cost.
Tangle vs Northflank
Pick Northflank for microVM sandboxes in your own cloud as well as its own, secrets added at egress, GPU sandboxes, and sandboxes with no time limit. Pick Tangle when you want coding agents installed in every sandbox, needing no model key, with one prompt call that returns the result, usage and cost.
Tangle vs Cloudflare Sandbox
Pick Cloudflare Sandbox when you already run on Workers and want microVM containers, in public beta for sandboxes, with the internet off by default and credentials kept in your Worker. Pick Tangle when you want coding agents installed in every sandbox and driven from a TypeScript or Python SDK, with one prompt call that returns the result, usage and cost.
Tangle vs Blaxel
Pick Blaxel for sandboxes that resume from standby in about 25 ms with memory intact, a built-in MCP server on every sandbox, and an egress proxy that injects secrets (public preview). Pick Tangle when you want coding agents installed in every sandbox, one prompt call that returns the result, usage and cost, and a fleet budget set in dollars.
Tangle vs Beam
Pick Beam for VMs that pause with RAM and processes intact, a browser desktop, sandboxes that fork from snapshots, GPUs on the same SDK, and your own cloud. Pick Tangle when you want coding agents installed in every sandbox and one prompt call that returns the result, usage and cost.
Tangle vs Fly.io Sprites
Pick Fly.io Sprites for hardware-isolated Linux VMs that suspend with memory frozen, automatic filesystem checkpoints, and connectors that keep credentials out of the VM. Pick Tangle when your coding agent should need no model key, return its result, usage and cost from one prompt call, and stop at a fleet budget you set in dollars.
Tangle vs Upstash Box
Pick Upstash Box for a persistent box with Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode or Cursor built in, git to pull request, a headless browser and cron schedules. Pick Tangle when your coding agent should need no model key of your own, when you want Pi, Kimi Code or Prime Agent, or when you run in Europe.
Tangle vs Runloop
Pick Runloop for devboxes you snapshot and branch, a credential gateway and MCP hub, SSH access, deployment in your own cloud, and agent evaluations beside the sandbox. Pick Tangle when you want Pi, Hermes, Kimi Code or Prime Agent installed in every sandbox, needing no model key, with one prompt call that returns the result, usage and cost.
Tangle vs boat.dev
Pick boat.dev for a full Linux VM per sandbox with its own kernel, a built-in desktop, seven coding agents installed, and 100 to 2,000 sandboxes at once by plan. Pick Tangle when your coding agent should need no model key of your own, when you want Hermes or OpenClaw, or when you need a GPU next to the agent or a US region.
Start times: our measurements, their published claims
| Tangle, measured | p50 | p95 | Runs | Failed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| New sandbox, ready to use | 1.5s | 12s | 393 | 56 of 425 |
| Create, then run a first command | 1.7s | 8s | 74 | 3 of 77 |
| Claude Code's first reply, from create | 3.4s | 12s | 45 | 3 of 48 |
| Codex's first reply, from create | 3.3s | 18s | 44 | 3 of 47 |
Production runs from 2026-11-02 to 2026-11-09, the same rows tangle.tools/benchmarks draws.
- E2B publishes usage, not a start time, on the pages linked here: 2B+ sandboxes started and 100K+ teams. (e2b.dev)
- Daytona states "Sub 90ms sandbox creation from code to execution" on its home page. (daytona.io)
- Modal states "Create over a million Sandboxes in under a minute, and run up to 1M concurrently" and "Sub-second starts on large custom images and at high concurrency". (modal.com)
- Modal's engineering post of 2026-07-16 reports sandbox start times under half a second at the median in its 1M-sandbox test, and says the tail is longer than it would like. (modal.com/blog/scaling-to-1-million-concurrent-sandboxes-in-seconds)
- Vercel states "Sandboxes start in milliseconds, making them ideal for real-time user interactions and latency-sensitive workloads." (vercel.com/docs/vercel-sandbox)
- Northflank states "Ready in 0.8 seconds" for a sandbox, covering scheduling, VM boot and container start with a cached image. (northflank.com/product/sandboxes)
- Northflank states it can "Spawn millions of fast, secure sandboxes for agents, the code they generate, and dynamic environments." (northflank.com/product/sandboxes)
- Northflank states "50,000+ environments in parallel for rollouts." (northflank.com/product/sandboxes)
- For Dynamic Workers, Cloudflare lists the use case "Load prototypes, previews, and playgrounds in milliseconds." (developers.cloudflare.com/dynamic-workers)
- Blaxel states "microVMs that boot in milliseconds and resume in ~25ms." (blaxel.ai)
- Blaxel states "Scale up to 100,000+ sandboxes or agents and up to 512 TB of storage with a tier-based quota system." (blaxel.ai)
- Blaxel states "Sapiom ran 2.5 million of them on Blaxel", as a customer volume. (blaxel.ai/blog/blaxel-is-joining-baseten-to-build-the-future-of-agentic-infrastructure)
- Beam states "Each sandbox starts in about half a second with its own filesystem and networking." (beam.cloud)
- Beam states "New sandbox, 100 launched at once" takes 0.55s. (beam.cloud)
- Beam states a paused VM resumes with "RAM intact" in about 1s. (beam.cloud)
- Beam states "New VM from a cached image" takes about 2.5s. (beam.cloud)
- Fly states "Snapshot the whole filesystem in about a second." (fly.io/sprites)
- Fly states of a warm Sprite "The next request resumes it in 100–500ms, and processes pick up mid-thought, exactly where they were." (docs.fly.io/sprites/concepts/lifecycle.md)
- Fly states of a cold Sprite "The next wake takes 1–2s and starts processes fresh." (docs.fly.io/sprites/concepts/lifecycle.md)
- Upstash states "Run your first agent in minutes". (upstash.com/box)
- Runloop states "10GB image startup time in <2s". (runloop.ai)
- Runloop states "Run 10k+ parallel sandboxes". (runloop.ai)
- Runloop states "ultra fast command execution at 100ms". (runloop.ai)
- boat states "Run up to 2,000 cloud computers at once for your agents, with a browser and files that stay." (boat.dev)
- boat states "Get a VM in seconds, scale with your plan". (boat.dev)
- boat states "Resume takes seconds, but each resume counts as a start." (docs.boat.dev/faq.md)
- On its home page boat reports, for a V8 benchmark in StarSling's run of 3 October 2026, "boat: 28.06 runs per second, second fastest." boat notes providers ran on different hardware in different regions. (boat.dev)
These are different tests, and we have not run E2B, Daytona, Modal and 9 more through our benchmark. agent-runtime runs the same agent code on Tangle, E2B and Daytona, so you can run your own task on each: run the same agent on E2B, Daytona and more.
Prices are on each pricing page
Tangle: plans and the rate card. E2B: e2b.dev/pricing. Daytona: daytona.io/pricing. Modal: modal.com/pricing. Vercel Sandbox: vercel.com/docs/vercel-sandbox/pricing. Northflank: northflank.com/pricing. Cloudflare Sandbox: developers.cloudflare.com/containers/pricing. Blaxel: blaxel.ai/pricing. Beam: beam.cloud/pricing. Fly.io Sprites: fly.io/pricing. Upstash Box: upstash.com/pricing/box. Runloop: runloop.ai/pricing. boat.dev: boat.dev.