CreateOS Sandbox vs Buildkite
Buildkite suits engineering organisations with large CI that want to choose where builds run, on their own machines or on hosted agents billed per second. CreateOS Sandbox suits agent sessions that start from an API call, stay reachable and pause between steps. Both bill per second; they differ on what starts the work and how long it lives.
Pricing at a Glance
CreateOS rates verified 17 October 2026. Buildkite 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
Lower compute rate- Compute
- $0.0362 /vCPU-hr
- Memory
- $0.0116 /GiB-hr
Buildkite
- Compute
- $0.2400 /vCPU-hr
- Memory
- See below
Buildkite Free is $0 for up to 5 users with 2,000 Linux vCPU-minutes, Pro is $30 per active user per month, and hosted agents cost $0.004 per vCPU-minute on Linux and $0.02 per vCPU-minute on Mac, billed per second, as of 17 October 2026.
Where CreateOS Sandbox Fits Better
What CreateOS Sandbox brings to this matchup, with a plain note on where Buildkite has the edge.
A lower published vCPU rate: $0.03616363 per vCPU-hour, against $0.24 on Buildkite hosted Linux (CreateOS bills memory separately).
A sandbox lives past one job: pause it, resume it later or fork it.
An opt-in inbound HTTPS URL; Buildkite hosted agents take no inbound traffic.
Where Buildkite is strong
A hybrid model at scale. Run the open-source agent on your own machines with no concurrency ceiling, or use hosted agents on dedicated hardware billed per second with no minimums.
Which to Pick
Pick CreateOS Sandbox if
- Work starts from an agent's API call, not a pipeline
- The environment must outlive a single job
- You need a public URL into the running machine
Pick Buildkite if
- You run large CI and want builds on your own machines
- You need dynamic pipelines and hosted macOS agents
- You want hosted and self-hosted agents in one control plane
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 | Buildkite |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | API-created sandboxes for agent-written and untrusted code | Large-scale CI pipelines, often on self-hosted agents |
| Isolation | Firecracker micro-VM with its own guest kernel | Hosted agents: ephemeral VM per job on a proprietary virtualization layer; hypervisor-level isolation between clusters |
| Trigger model | API, SDK, CLI or MCP call, on demand | Pipeline jobs; REST and GraphQL APIs |
| Session length | No cap; optional idle auto-pause from 60 s to 24 h, off by default | Not published |
| Pause and resume | Yes. Saves disk, memory and CPU state; vCPU stops billing while paused, memory and storage still bill | No pause or resume API; job environment destroyed after each job, cache volumes persist per cluster |
| Outbound network | Open with no rules; deny-by-default once any rule exists (host, IP, CIDR, wildcard), enforced on the host outside the VM | Not published |
| 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 active user per month plus $0.004 per vCPU-minute (Linux), billed per second |
Common Questions
How does Buildkite's hosted agent rate compare with CreateOS?
Buildkite hosted Linux costs $0.004 per vCPU-minute, or $0.24 per vCPU-hour, with memory bundled into each shape. CreateOS charges $0.03616363 per vCPU-hour plus $0.01159025 per GiB-hour, both per second, so a 2 vCPU / 4 GB sandbox costs about $0.12 an hour before storage.
Is the Buildkite agent open source?
Yes. The Buildkite agent is open source under the MIT licence, and self-hosted agents are the core model, while the control plane is SaaS. CreateOS publishes its MCP server as open source; the sandbox platform itself is self-hostable only for Enterprise customers.
Can Buildkite hosted agents keep data between jobs?
Only through cache volumes, which persist per cluster on Linux and macOS hosted agents; the job environment itself is destroyed after each job. A CreateOS sandbox keeps its filesystem until destroyed, and pausing keeps its memory too.
Sources
Checked 17 October 2026.
See CreateOS Sandbox for yourself
Book a demo, or explore the Sandbox and its pricing.