CreateOS Sandbox vs Alibaba Cloud Agent Sandbox
Pick Alibaba Cloud Agent Sandbox if you already run on Alibaba Cloud or serve users in China and Asia-Pacific, and want very low per-second rates with E2B-compatible APIs. Pick CreateOS Sandbox if you want a standalone sandbox service with published per-plan sizes, a documented egress default and no 24-hour session ceiling.
Pricing at a Glance
CreateOS rates verified 17 October 2026. Alibaba Cloud Agent Sandbox pricing as published on 17 October 2026. Rates billed per GB rather than per GiB, or as bundled sizes, are quoted as published rather than converted.
CreateOS Sandbox
- Compute
- $0.0362 /vCPU-hr
- Memory
- $0.0116 /GiB-hr
Alibaba Cloud Agent Sandbox
- Compute
- $0.0179 /vCPU-hr
- Memory
- $0.0089 /GiB-hr
Alibaba Cloud Agent Sandbox bills per second outside China at $0.00000496 per vCPU-second and $0.00000248 per GiB-second on the Default class, with Economy priced lower and Performance higher, as of 17 October 2026.
Where CreateOS Sandbox Fits Better
What CreateOS Sandbox brings to this matchup, with a plain note on where Alibaba Cloud Agent Sandbox has the edge.
No session cap; an Alibaba sandbox timeout tops out at 86,400 seconds (24 hours).
Published sandbox sizes per plan, up to 8 vCPU / 16 GB; Alibaba does not publish per-sandbox size limits.
A documented outbound default: open with no rules, deny-by-default once any rule exists. Alibaba does not publish its default.
Where Alibaba Cloud Agent Sandbox is strong
Alibaba Cloud Agent Sandbox publishes very low per-second rates, memory-preserving hibernation and batch cloning from a checkpoint (vendor-stated: tens of thousands from one), inside Alibaba Cloud with VPC, security groups and a Kubernetes edition. E2B code can point at it by changing the endpoint.
Which to Pick
Pick CreateOS Sandbox if
- You want a sandbox account without adopting a full cloud provider.
- Your sessions run longer than 24 hours.
- You need documented size limits before you commit.
Pick Alibaba Cloud Agent Sandbox if
- Your workloads already run on Alibaba Cloud.
- You serve users in mainland China or Hong Kong.
- You need very large parallel RL rollouts cloned from one checkpoint.
Head-to-Head Comparison
Every dimension side by side, checked on 17 October 2026 against each vendor's own docs and pricing pages. "Not published" means we could not find it on the vendor's pages, not that the feature is missing.
| Dimension | CreateOS Sandbox | Alibaba Cloud Agent Sandbox |
|---|---|---|
| Isolation | Firecracker micro-VM with its own guest kernel | Independent VM per sandbox (vendor-stated); hypervisor not named |
| Pause and resume | Saves disk, memory and CPU state; vCPU billing stops, memory and storage still bill | Deep hibernation snapshots memory and bills disk; light hibernation keeps memory and stops vCPU billing |
| Fork | Forks a paused sandbox into many independent copies | Checkpoint a running sandbox and batch-clone from it |
| Outbound network default | Open with no rules; deny-by-default once any host, IP, CIDR or wildcard rule exists, enforced on the host outside the VM | Default not published; security groups and L4/L7 network policies |
| Largest size | 8 vCPU / 16 GB on Enterprise; 8 vCPU / 8 GB on Pro | Not published; template defaults of 2 vCPU / 2 GiB |
| Concurrency | 1 / 5 / 20 / 30 by plan (Free to Enterprise); paused sandboxes count | Million-scale (vendor-stated); per-account quotas not published |
| Session length | No cap; optional idle auto-pause from 60 s to 24 h, off by default | Timeout up to 86,400 s (24 hours) |
| Billing | Per second: $0.03616363/vCPU-hr, $0.01159025/GiB-hr, $0.0001584/GB-hr storage; no egress fees, 50 GiB bandwidth budget per sandbox | Per second; Default class outside China $0.017856 per vCPU-hour, $0.008928 per GiB-hour |
| SDKs and interfaces | TypeScript, Go, Python, Rust, C#, Java (all but TypeScript pre-1.0), CLI, MCP, REST | E2B SDK compatible through endpoint config; Kubernetes API; Alibaba Cloud SDK |
| Self-host or BYOC | Enterprise only, onboarded by our team | Container Edition runs in your Alibaba Cloud Kubernetes (ACS) cluster |
Common Questions
Is Alibaba Cloud Agent Sandbox compatible with E2B?
Yes, for the Flash Edition: you can use the E2B Python or JavaScript SDK by changing the endpoint configuration. The Container Edition uses a Kubernetes API with a Sandbox custom resource instead. CreateOS Sandbox uses its own SDKs, REST API, CLI and MCP server.
How long can an Alibaba Cloud agent sandbox run?
Up to 86,400 seconds, or 24 hours, set through setTimeout, with an idle timeout from 60 seconds on the code-interpreter template. CreateOS Sandbox has no lifetime cap; a sandbox runs until you destroy or pause it, and idle auto-pause is optional.
Is Alibaba Cloud Agent Sandbox cheaper than CreateOS?
On published rates, yes. The Default class outside China is $0.017856 per vCPU-hour and $0.008928 per GiB-hour, labelled reference prices. CreateOS Sandbox charges $0.03616363 per vCPU-hour and $0.01159025 per GiB-hour. Egress and dependent Alibaba Cloud services bill separately.
Sources
Checked 17 October 2026.
See CreateOS Sandbox for yourself
Book a demo, or explore the Sandbox and its pricing.