CreateOS Sandbox vs Firecrawl
Firecrawl is the right tool when the agent's main need is clean web data, with the occasional click or login through Interact. CreateOS Sandbox is the right tool when the agent needs to run code well beyond Playwright snippets, in a VM it can use for hours.
Pricing at a Glance
CreateOS rates verified 17 October 2026. Firecrawl 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
Firecrawl
Interact costs 2 credits per session minute for code or 7 with AI prompts, prorated per second, and scrapes cost 1 credit per page, on annual plans from Free (1,000 credits) to Scale at $599/month, as of 17 October 2026.
Where CreateOS Sandbox Fits Better
What CreateOS Sandbox brings to this matchup, with a plain note on where Firecrawl has the edge.
Any program runs in the VM; Interact runs only Playwright code or Bash for the agent-browser CLI.
Sandboxes have no lifetime TTL, against Interact's 10-minute default session.
An outbound allowlist you control, enforced on the host outside the VM.
Where Firecrawl is strong
Firecrawl is the best-known open-source web-to-markdown pipeline, with SDKs in nine languages, and its browser is attached to the scrape so an agent goes from page data to interaction in one call.
Which to Pick
Pick CreateOS Sandbox if
- The agent runs builds, tests or data jobs, not only page interaction.
- Sessions need to last hours.
- You want to expose a service the agent starts over HTTPS.
Pick Firecrawl if
- You need clean markdown or structured data from websites for RAG or agents.
- You want SDKs in Python, Node, Go, Java, Ruby, Rust, .NET, PHP or Elixir.
- Interaction with pages is occasional and short.
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 | Firecrawl |
|---|---|---|
| What you get (browser vs full Linux machine) | Full Linux micro-VM; the desktop:1 image adds an XFCE desktop, Google Chrome and a computer-use API | Scrape, crawl, map and search APIs, plus Interact sessions on a scraped page |
| Isolation | Firecracker micro-VM with its own guest kernel, root filesystem and network identity | Not published |
| Session length | No lifetime cap; optional idle auto-pause from 60 s to 24 h, off by default | Interact TTL default 10 minutes, inactivity 5 minutes; per-call timeout 1 to 300 s (default 30 s) |
| Run arbitrary code | Yes: exec, shell, files and managed processes; devbox:1 ships Python 3.12, Node.js 24, Go, Rust and Docker | Interact runs Node or Python Playwright code, or Bash for the agent-browser CLI |
| Outbound network | Open with no rules; deny-by-default once any host, IP, CIDR or wildcard rule exists, enforced on the host outside the VM | Not published; static egress IPs on Enterprise |
| Billing | Per second: $0.03616363/vCPU-hr, $0.01159025/GiB-hr, storage $0.0001584/GB-hr; no per-GB egress price, 50 GiB bandwidth budget per sandbox | Credits: Interact 2 per minute (code) or 7 (AI prompts), prorated per second; plans Free to Scale $599/mo (annual) |
| Pause and resume | Pause saves disk, memory and CPU state; vCPU stops billing, memory and storage still bill | Named profiles save cookies, localStorage and session state when a session stops |
| Interfaces | SDKs in TypeScript, Go, Python, Rust, C# and Java (all but TypeScript pre-1.0), CLI, MCP server, REST API | SDKs in nine languages, CLI, MCP server, REST API |
Common Questions
Is Firecrawl's Browser Sandbox still a product?
It now goes by Interact. Firecrawl's /browser page describes the Interact API, and the earlier Browser Sandbox name appears in its blog. Interact gives an agent a live browser on a page it has scraped, driven by Playwright code or prompts.
Is Firecrawl open source?
Yes, under AGPL-3.0 on GitHub, though how much of Interact the self-hosted version covers is not published. CreateOS self-hosting is not an open-source install; it is an Enterprise arrangement onboarded by the CreateOS team.
How long can a Firecrawl Interact session run?
Ten minutes by default, with a 5-minute inactivity timeout and a per-call execution limit of 1 to 300 seconds. CreateOS sandboxes have no lifetime cap and auto-pause only if you turn that setting on.
Sources
Checked 17 October 2026.
See CreateOS Sandbox for yourself
Book a demo, or explore the Sandbox and its pricing.