CreateOS Sandbox vs Islo
Pick Islo if your coding agents run unattended against real internal services and you need credentials injected at egress, per-request audit and BYOC. Pick CreateOS Sandbox if you need memory kept across pause and fork, published size, concurrency and region limits, and lower per-hour rates.
Pricing at a Glance
CreateOS rates verified 17 October 2026. Islo 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
Islo
- Compute
- $0.0700 /vCPU-hr
- Memory
- See below
Islo meters hourly while a computer runs at $0.07 per CPU-hour, $0.04 per GB-hour of memory and $0.0007 per GB-hour of storage, as of 17 October 2026.
Where CreateOS Sandbox Fits Better
What CreateOS Sandbox brings to this matchup, with a plain note on where Islo has the edge.
Pause and fork carry memory and CPU state; Islo snapshots capture the filesystem only.
Published ceilings: 8 vCPU / 16 GB on Enterprise, 1 to 30 concurrent sandboxes by plan, and eu and us regions.
Lower rates: $0.03616363 per vCPU-hour and $0.01159025 per GiB-hour against $0.07 and $0.04.
Where Islo is strong
Islo's gateway is the standout: credentials are injected at egress so agents never hold keys, with per-request audit, response filtering and team-level governance profiles, on long-lived computers that keep state across runs.
Which to Pick
Pick CreateOS Sandbox if
- You fork agents from a warm state that includes running processes.
- You need written limits on size, concurrency and region before you buy.
- Per-hour compute cost is a deciding factor.
Pick Islo if
- Agents must call GitHub, Slack, Jira or internal APIs without ever holding the credentials.
- You need a per-request audit of what agents sent out.
- You want the control plane and computers deployed in your own VPC.
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 | Islo |
|---|---|---|
| Isolation | Firecracker micro-VM with its own guest kernel, root filesystem and network identity | microVM per agent computer with its own kernel (vendor-stated; hypervisor not named) |
| Pause and resume | Saves disk, memory and CPU state; vCPU stops billing while paused, memory and storage still bill | Pause snapshots VM state and releases compute, keeping the filesystem; lifecycle policies pause on idle or runtime |
| Fork | Fork a paused sandbox into many independent copies, each with its own id and IP | Restore a snapshot into new sandboxes; snapshots capture filesystem state, not memory |
| 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 | No gateway applies by default and docs do not say whether egress is then open; gateway profiles set allow or deny rules and inject credentials |
| Inbound access | Closed by default; opt-in public HTTPS URL, plus API-authenticated shell and port tunnels | HTTPS share URLs per port (24-hour default TTL); port-forward for non-HTTP |
| Largest size | 8 vCPU / 16 GB on Enterprise (Pro 8 vCPU / 8 GB, Beginner 4 / 4, Free 1 / 1) | Not published (vCPU, memory and disk settable on create) |
| Concurrency | Free 1, Beginner 5, Pro 20, Enterprise 30; paused sandboxes count toward the cap | Not published (paused sandboxes do not count against running quotas) |
| 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 | Hourly while running: $0.07 per CPU-hour, $0.04 per GB-hour, $0.0007 per GB-hour storage |
| SDKs and interfaces | TypeScript, Go, Python, Rust, C#, Java (all but TypeScript pre-1.0), CLI, MCP, REST | TypeScript SDK, CLI, REST API, docs MCP server |
| Self-host or BYOC | Enterprise only, onboarded by our team; not open source | BYOC: control plane and agent computers can run in your VPC |
Common Questions
Do Islo snapshots include memory?
No. Islo snapshots capture filesystem state, so restoring one into a new sandbox does not bring back running processes. CreateOS Sandbox pause saves disk, memory and CPU registers, and a fork from a paused sandbox starts with that full state.
Does Islo keep API keys out of the agent's sandbox?
Yes, that is Islo's core feature: its gateway injects credentials at egress and audits each request, so the agent never holds the key. CreateOS Sandbox filters outbound destinations on the host but does not document credential injection.
Can Islo run in my own cloud account?
Yes, Islo supports BYOC with the control plane and agent computers deployed in your VPC. CreateOS offers self-hosting and BYOC to Enterprise customers only, onboarded by its team rather than as a self-serve install.
Sources
Checked 17 October 2026.
See CreateOS Sandbox for yourself
Book a demo, or explore the Sandbox and its pricing.