Boat, a Y Combinator company, made a simple bet: give every AI agent a full Ubuntu computer of its own, with a browser and a desktop inside. The bet is spreading fast, because coding agents and computer-use models now run commands and operate apps for hours, and each one needs an isolated machine it can break safely.
The best Boat alternatives are Solari, E2B, Daytona, Blaxel and Vercel Sandbox. Solari leads the list because it runs sandboxes, desktops and cloud browsers from one API, and it is almost 3x cheaper than E2B and Daytona per sandbox hour and about 1.3x faster than E2B on a sandbox's full lifecycle. This guide compares each on features, pricing and fit.
Key Takeaways
Choose Solari when your agents need sandboxes, desktops and cloud browsers on one account, with fast starts and low hourly rates.
Choose E2B when you want a code sandbox with a free tier and a flat monthly Pro plan.
Choose Daytona when you need container, Linux VM, Windows or GPU sandboxes from one provider.
Choose Blaxel when your agents sit idle most of the time and should cost nothing while suspended.
Choose Vercel Sandbox when your app already ships on Vercel and agent code should run next to it.
Why Look for a Boat Alternative?
Boat gives each agent a full virtual machine with Docker, systemd, a desktop, a browser and snapshot forking, and its CLI prompts an agent running inside the VM from the outside. Teams usually start comparing for one of four reasons:
The agent also needs a browser fleet. One browser inside one VM suits one agent at a time. Research, QA and enrichment agents often need hundreds of isolated browser sessions with saved logins, which calls for a cloud browser service next to the sandbox.
Procurement asks about scale and compliance. A pilot and a production rollout raise different questions. Concurrency ceilings, HIPAA and contract terms decide the shortlist once agents touch customer data.
The workload is short-lived code. Many agent tasks are a few seconds of Python in a sandbox, not a full dev machine. A code-interpreter API with stateful execution can fit those jobs better.
Cost at volume. Hourly rates compound as fleets grow. The cheapest plan for a pilot is not always the cheapest at thousands of machines a day.
1. Solari
Solari launched as agent infrastructure from one API: cloud browsers, AI sandboxes and computer desktops, on one account and one bill.
Core capabilities. A Solari sandbox is an isolated Linux machine for agent-generated code, with commands, files, Git and Python that keeps its state between calls. Pause saves memory and processes, and resume brings the sandbox back exactly as it was; snapshot and fork let an agent branch from a known state. Desktops add a full Linux screen with a live view for computer-use models.
Speed. A Solari VM starts usually in about a second, so an agent that gets a fresh machine per task barely waits. The lifecycle lead over E2B above means every create, run and teardown cycle finishes sooner across a whole fleet.
Pricing and plans. Solari starts free and bills per second while an environment runs, so you pay for the minutes your agents work. The price gap over E2B and Daytona above holds as you scale, and with Solari you can run up to 100,000 concurrent sandboxes or desktops when a fleet needs it.
Browsers in the same account. With Solari you can run cloud browsers next to your sandboxes and drive them with Playwright. Profiles keep a login between runs and session recording replays what the agent did, so a coding agent can test the web app it just built without a second vendor.
Where it fits. E2B and Daytona are the more established sandbox vendors with larger ecosystems; Solari is the younger company and moves faster on speed and price. Teams that pick Solari usually want code execution and the web from one API key.
Who it's best for. Platform teams running coding, research or computer-use agents. It suits a team that would otherwise pay one vendor for sandboxes and another for browsers.
2. E2B
E2B is a sandbox platform for running AI-generated code, billed per second with custom CPU and memory on paid plans.
Pricing and plans. E2B says its Hobby tier is free with a $100 one-time usage credit, sessions up to 1 hour and 20 concurrent sandboxes; Pro is $150 a month plus usage, with sessions up to 24 hours and 100 concurrent sandboxes, expandable to 1,100 with add-ons; Enterprise needs a $3,000 monthly minimum. A team that outgrows Hobby pays a fixed monthly fee before usage, so compare the plan fee and the hourly rate together.
Where it fits. E2B suits agents that run short code tasks and return results. A team with a handful of concurrent agents can stay on Hobby while it builds.
Trade-off. Concurrency is tied to the plan, so a fleet past the Pro ceiling pays for add-ons on top of the monthly fee. E2B is a sandbox-only vendor, so web tasks need a separate browser provider.
3. Daytona
Daytona sells sandboxes as an agent cloud, with four sandbox classes behind one API.
Pricing and plans. Daytona says it bills pay as you go at $0.0504 per vCPU-hour and $0.0162 per GiB-hour of memory, per second, with $200 in free compute to start. There is no fixed monthly plan, and enterprise limits come through sales.
Where it fits. Daytona offers container, Linux VM, Windows and GPU sandboxes. The VM classes run a full virtual machine with its own kernel, which suits agents that need Windows apps or GPU work in the same account.
Trade-off. Daytona sandboxes run as Linux containers by default, so a team that wants a VM boundary picks that class on purpose. Check which class each workload lands on before comparing hourly rates.
4. Blaxel
Blaxel runs each agent in a microVM that suspends to zero when idle and resumes with its memory and filesystem intact.
Pricing and plans. Blaxel says it bills only active compute and gives free credits to start, and suspended time does not count. Quotas rise in tiers as an account tops up.
Where it fits. Blaxel's resume from standby keeps the full memory state, which suits agents that wait on people or long model calls between bursts of work. Blaxel is also a sandbox provider in the OpenAI Agents SDK.
Trade-off. Scale-to-zero saves the most on bursty agents. A sandbox that runs steadily all day gains less, so compare on your real duty cycle.
5. Vercel Sandbox
Vercel Sandbox runs untrusted and agent-generated code, with each sandbox a Firecracker microVM with its own filesystem and network.
Pricing and plans. Vercel bills Sandbox on active CPU and provisioned memory, so time spent waiting on a network call or a model does not count as CPU. Rates vary by region, and paid-plan usage draws down Vercel's monthly credit first.
Where it fits. Sandboxes ship with an Ubuntu image, Node LTS and Python, a separate Linux account per agent and OIDC auth. A team already deploying on Vercel gets agent code execution in the account it already has.
Trade-off. The value is highest inside the Vercel stack. A team on another cloud adds a Vercel account for one primitive.
Which Boat Alternative Should You Choose?
Choose Solari over Boat when your agents need a browser fleet, sandboxes and desktops on one account, when start time matters because every task gets a fresh machine, or when you need fleet-scale concurrency on one contract. Pick E2B for simple code-interpreter jobs, Daytona for Windows or GPU classes, Blaxel for agents that idle more than they run, and Vercel Sandbox for apps already on Vercel.
Stay with Boat when one full Ubuntu dev machine per agent, with a desktop built in and a CLI that drives the agent from outside, is exactly the shape of your work. Whichever you pick, the people stay in charge of what matters: which tasks an agent may run, what it may touch and who approves what it ships.
Get Started With Solari
Start with one job, such as running your coding agent's test suite in a sandbox, then add a browser for the web steps once it runs cleanly. Solari is the fastest and cheapest way to run cloud browsers and VMs for coding and computer-use agents. Get started with a free account and start running your agents today.
