CreateOS Sandbox vs Bitbucket Pipelines
If your code and tickets live in Bitbucket and Jira, Pipelines gives you CI with no extra vendor and step sizes up to 64 CPU / 128 GB. If your agent needs a machine on demand, outside any pipeline, that stays up as long as the session does, CreateOS Sandbox is the fit. Pipelines answers commits; CreateOS answers API calls.
Pricing at a Glance
CreateOS rates verified 17 October 2026. Bitbucket Pipelines 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
Bitbucket Pipelines
Bitbucket Free is $0 for up to 5 users with 50 build minutes; the pricing page lists Standard at $3.65/user/month and Premium at $8/user/month, extra 1,000 minutes cost $10/month, and larger steps use minutes at a multiple, as of 17 October 2026.
Where CreateOS Sandbox Fits Better
What CreateOS Sandbox brings to this matchup, with a plain note on where Bitbucket Pipelines has the edge.
Starts from an API call, not a repository event.
No session cap, where a Pipelines step stops at 720 minutes at most.
State survives: pause and resume a sandbox, or fork it. Pipelines steps keep nothing except declared caches and artifacts.
Inbound HTTPS on request; Pipelines steps take no inbound traffic.
Where Bitbucket Pipelines is strong
Zero-setup CI for Bitbucket repositories, with step sizes up to 64 CPU / 128 GB and tight links to Jira and Atlassian permissions.
Which to Pick
Pick CreateOS Sandbox if
- Your agent needs an environment outside the CI pipeline
- Sessions run longer than 12 hours
- You need to open a port or keep state between steps
Pick Bitbucket Pipelines if
- Your repositories are on Bitbucket Cloud
- You want CI tied to Jira issues and Atlassian permissions
- You need build steps up to 64 CPU / 128 GB
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 | Bitbucket Pipelines |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | API-created sandboxes for agent-written and untrusted code | Building, testing and deploying code in Bitbucket Cloud repositories |
| Isolation | Firecracker micro-VM with its own guest kernel | Docker container per step; underlying host isolation not published |
| Ephemeral per-run environments | Yes. Create a sandbox per task by API, SDK, CLI or MCP and destroy it after | Yes; each step starts fresh |
| Pause and resume | Yes. Saves disk, memory and CPU state; vCPU stops billing while paused, memory and storage still bill | Not published; nothing persists between steps except declared caches and artifacts |
| Outbound network | Open with no rules; deny-by-default once any rule exists (host, IP, CIDR, wildcard), enforced on the host outside the VM | Allowed; traffic from AWS us-east-1/us-west-2 ranges, or narrower Atlassian ranges on 4x+ steps; IPv4 only |
| Billing | Per second: $0.03616363/vCPU-hr, $0.01159025/GiB-hr, storage $0.0001584/GB-hr; no egress fees (50 GiB bandwidth budget per sandbox by default) | Per-user subscription with included build minutes; larger steps use minutes at a multiple |
| Run untrusted code | Yes, the core use case; each sandbox is its own micro-VM | Not published as a use case; steps run on repository events or pipeline runs |
Common Questions
How long can a Bitbucket Pipelines step run?
120 minutes by default, configurable from 1 to 720 minutes, so 12 hours at most. A CreateOS sandbox has no session length cap; it runs until you destroy or pause it, or until an idle auto-pause you configure kicks in.
Can I control which IPs Bitbucket Pipelines traffic comes from?
Partly. Outbound traffic originates from AWS us-east-1 and us-west-2 ranges, and steps of 4x and larger can use narrower Atlassian IP ranges with atlassian-ip-ranges. CreateOS controls where traffic may go instead: allowlists by host, IP or CIDR, enforced outside the VM.
Does Bitbucket Pipelines support self-hosted runners?
Yes. Bitbucket supports self-hosted Linux Docker and shell runners, while the service itself stays SaaS. CreateOS self-hosting is available only to Enterprise customers and is onboarded by the CreateOS team.
Sources
Checked 17 October 2026.
- Bitbucket Pipelines: pricing
- Bitbucket Pipelines: limitations of bitbucket pipelines
- Bitbucket Pipelines: step options
- Bitbucket Pipelines: what are the bitbucket cloud ip addresses i should use to configure my corporate firewall
- CreateOS Sandbox limits
- CreateOS Sandbox egress rules
- CreateOS pause, resume and fork
See CreateOS Sandbox for yourself
Book a demo, or explore the Sandbox and its pricing.