In 2026, AI agents stopped being single prompts and became long jobs that run for hours. The environment an agent works in now has to keep its files, its processes and its place between steps, and choosing that environment is now a decision about state as much as compute.
Solari and Archil both sell that environment, from opposite ends. Solari is the faster and cheaper runtime: its sandboxes finish a full lifecycle faster than the incumbents, its compute costs less per vCPU-hour, and browsers and desktops sit on the same account. Archil is built around storage, with durable disks that outlive any one sandbox. This guide compares the two on speed, price and fit.
Key Takeaways
Choose Solari when your agent runs code, works on the web and operates desktop apps in the same job. You get one API, one bill, a published sandbox speed and the lower compute rate.
Choose Archil when a shared filesystem is the center of your system. Many sandboxes, servers and apps read the same files, and those files sync to your own bucket.
Why Does Agent State Matter Now?
The first agent sandboxes were disposable: create a sandbox, run one snippet, throw it away. That works for a single tool call and breaks for a coding agent that clones a repository, installs dependencies and builds context over an afternoon. Rebuilding that setup on every step costs minutes and money.
The new pattern keeps state, and the two vendors keep different parts of it. Solari keeps the whole machine: pause a sandbox and its memory and running processes are saved, then resume it exactly where it stopped. Archil keeps the files: compute comes and goes, and a durable disk carries the work from one call to the next.
What Is Solari?
Solari is agent infrastructure: cloud browsers, AI sandboxes and computer desktops from one API and one account.
Core capabilities. A Solari sandbox is an isolated Linux machine with 1 to 8 vCPUs and up to 16 GB of memory, where your agent runs commands and code, moves files, and can pause, snapshot, revert and fork. Solari desktops add a screen that computer use models can see and operate. Browsers run Playwright or any CDP client.
Where it shines. Speed and state. A Solari browser session is created in 8 ms on Steel's open-source benchmark, and a running sandbox can be snapshotted and forked into parallel copies, so one prepared machine becomes many identical starting points.
Who it's best for. Teams whose agents mix code and the web, such as an agent that signs in to a vendor portal, downloads a report and analyses it in a sandbox. A Solari profile keeps that login between runs, so the agent signs in once.
What Is Archil?
Archil calls itself "the serverless runtime for intelligence": durable disks, serverless tool calls and persistent sandboxes on one shared filesystem.
Core capabilities. Each tool call runs Bash, Python or Node against a disk, and the files it writes are there for the next call. The filesystem speaks POSIX to your servers and the Amazon S3 API to your applications, and Archil disks also mount in other vendors' sandboxes.
Where it shines. Storage and data ownership. Archil says a write is durable once fsync returns, so the next sandbox mounts the same files, and with your own bucket every file stays an ordinary S3 object that any S3 tool reads without Archil.
Who it's best for. Platforms that give every tenant, agent session or job its own disk. Archil is the natural pick when the data matters more than the machine it runs on.
Which Is Faster, Solari or Archil?
Solari publishes the speed of a whole sandbox run: a Solari sandbox completes its full lifecycle, create to teardown, about 1.3x faster than E2B under the same heavy workload. Archil publishes the speed of its storage instead, so the two vendors measure different steps.
Archil's latency table covers creating, mounting, checkpointing and branching disks, with a script you can rerun on your own account. Those are disk operations; a sandbox still has to boot around the disk before your agent runs its first command.
For an agent, the useful measures are time to first command and what survives a pause. Solari resumes a paused sandbox with its memory and processes intact, so a dev server or a long build is still running when your agent comes back. Named shells keep the working directory and variables between calls, so your agent never repeats its setup.
Which Is Cheaper, Solari or Archil?
Solari costs less per unit of compute. Archil's pricing puts its per vCPU-hour and per GiB-hour sandbox rates above every Solari plan's, with 5 file systems on its free plan and 20 concurrent sandboxes and 1,000 file systems on Developer.
Solari's sandbox rates fall as your plan grows, and memory costs $0.0077 per GB-hour on Professional. For an agent that keeps a machine running all day, the per-vCPU rate drives the bill, so the gap grows with every hour the agent works.
Solari's paid plans start at $20 a month, and the plan fee is spent on usage rather than added to it. With Solari you can run up to 100,000 sandboxes at once, so a fleet grows on one account instead of across vendors.
Archil also prices short jobs per call, with execution included in each serverless tool call. That suits agents that fire many short commands at a disk and never need a machine that stays up.
Which Fits Your Agents?
Solari fits agents that need a whole machine, a browser or a desktop; Archil fits agents whose work lives in shared files.
Coding agents. Clone, install and build in a Solari sandbox, pause it overnight and resume with every process still running. Snapshot the machine once setup is done, and every later task starts from that point.
Research agents that browse. Your agent reads sites in a Solari browser and analyses what it found in a sandbox on the same account. There is no second vendor to pay or wire up.
Computer-use agents. Solari desktops give a model a full Linux screen with a live view. Record the session and you keep a replay of what the agent did.
Evals and reinforcement learning. Fork many sandboxes from one prepared snapshot and run graded episodes in parallel. Rollouts need identical starting states, and forking gives you exactly that.
Shared data across many tenants. Archil gives each customer or job its own disk backed by your bucket. Pick it when the files must outlive every machine that touches them.
Where Are Agent Sandboxes Going Next?
Over the next year, the environment around agents changes in four ways:
State becomes the default. Pause and resume replace create and destroy for most agent work.
Compute and storage meet in the middle. Runtime vendors add durable storage and storage vendors add compute, as Archil's sandboxes already show.
One account per agent. Agents that browse, code and use desktop apps in one job will run on one platform.
Fleets, not single machines. Evals and parallel research push teams from one sandbox to thousands, and price per hour decides what those fleets cost.
What stays human is the judgment around the fleet: what an agent may touch, which data it keeps and who signs off on its output.
Get Started With Solari
Choose Solari over Archil when your agents need a full machine that resumes with its processes, a browser or a desktop, at the lower compute rate. Stay with Archil when a shared, bucket-backed filesystem is the core of your platform; Archil is the storage specialist, and Solari is the faster, cheaper runtime for agents that need the whole machine.
Start with one job, such as moving a coding agent's sandbox to Solari and pausing it between tasks, then add browsers and desktops as the agent grows. Solari is the fastest and cheapest way to run cloud browsers and VMs for coding and research agents. Get started with a free account and start running your agents today.
