CreateOS Sandbox vs Self-Hosted Firecracker
Self-host Firecracker if you need to own every layer of the sandbox stack and have engineers to run KVM hosts, networking, images and scheduling. Use CreateOS Sandbox if you want the same kind of Firecracker micro-VM behind an API now, with egress rules, ingress URLs, pause and fork already built. The trade is control and licence cost against the platform work Firecracker leaves to you.
Pricing at a Glance
CreateOS rates verified 17 October 2026. Self-hosted Firecracker 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
Self-hosted Firecracker
Firecracker is free under Apache 2.0; you pay for your own bare-metal servers, bandwidth and operations time, as of 17 October 2026.
Where CreateOS Sandbox Fits Better
What CreateOS Sandbox brings to this matchup, with a plain note on where Self-hosted Firecracker has the edge.
Orchestration is done: create, exec, files, tunnels and destroy over REST, CLI or SDKs, where Firecracker gives you a host-socket API per microVM.
Egress allowlists by host, IP, CIDR or wildcard, enforced on the host; with Firecracker you write the host networking and firewall rules yourself.
Fork from a paused sandbox gives each child its own id, IP and bandwidth ledger, while Firecracker's docs warn that resuming one snapshot more than once is insecure without uniqueness handling.
Opt-in HTTPS ingress URLs with managed certificates; Firecracker has no built-in ingress.
Where Self-hosted Firecracker is strong
KVM microVM isolation with a jailer and seccomp filters, memory overhead of 5 MiB or less for a small guest and boot to init in 125 ms or less (vendor-stated), full control over kernels and hardware, and no per-second vendor markup.
Which to Pick
Pick CreateOS Sandbox if
- You want working sandboxes from an API call, not a platform project.
- You need egress policy, ingress, pause, fork and a 90-day audit log of control-plane actions without building them.
- You may want to run on your own hardware later through the enterprise self-host option.
Pick Self-hosted Firecracker if
- You need custom guest kernels, a specific host kernel or full data residency on your own hardware.
- Your scale makes owning bare metal cheaper than paying per second.
- You have an infrastructure team ready to build scheduling, images, networking and quotas.
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 | Self-hosted Firecracker |
|---|---|---|
| Isolation | Firecracker micro-VM with its own guest kernel | KVM microVM plus jailer (cgroups, namespaces, dropped privileges) and seccomp filters |
| Create and destroy by API | Yes: REST API, CLI, MCP server and SDKs for TypeScript, Go, Python, Rust, C# and Java (all but TypeScript pre-1.0) | REST control API over a host socket per microVM; no hosted CLI or SDK |
| Memory snapshot (pause and resume) | Yes: disk, memory and CPU state saved; vCPU stops billing, memory and storage still bill | Yes: full snapshots of microVM state and guest memory; diff snapshots in developer preview |
| Fork | Yes: fork a paused sandbox into many independent sandboxes | Possible but unmanaged: one snapshot into several microVMs; docs call repeated resume insecure without uniqueness handling |
| Outbound network controls | Open with no rules; deny-by-default once any host, IP, CIDR or wildcard rule exists, enforced on the host outside the VM | No network unless you attach a tap device; policy is whatever you configure on the host |
| Billing granularity | Per second while running: $0.03616363/vCPU-hr, $0.01159025/GiB-hr, storage $0.0001584/GB-hr | Free software; you pay for hardware |
| Largest size | 8 vCPU / 16 GB on Enterprise; 8 vCPU / 8 GB on Pro | 32 vCPUs per microVM (API maximum); memory limited by the host |
| GPU | None; no GPU shapes | Not published; no GPU passthrough documented |
Common Questions
Does CreateOS Sandbox run on Firecracker?
Yes. Each CreateOS sandbox is a Firecracker micro-VM with its own guest kernel, root filesystem and network identity. The difference from self-hosting is everything around the VMM: API, images, egress rules, ingress, pause, fork, quotas and billing are run for you.
What does self-hosting Firecracker leave for me to build?
Per Firecracker's own docs, it is only the virtual machine monitor. Orchestration, image builds, networking, ingress, egress policy, multi-host scheduling and safe handling of snapshot clones are yours, and it needs Linux hosts with KVM, meaning bare metal or nested-virtualization-capable machines.
Can I run CreateOS Sandbox on my own hardware instead of raw Firecracker?
Only on the enterprise plan. Our team onboards your hardware, cloud account or on-premise machines into the managed data plane, so you get the CreateOS API on your own machines. There is no open-source or self-serve install of CreateOS.
Sources
Checked 17 October 2026.
- Firecracker: features, license, jailer, tested platforms
- Firecracker: boot time, memory overhead, startup
- Firecracker: snapshots, cloning caveats, networking after restore
- Firecracker: max vCPU (32)
- Firecracker: device model, processors, RESTful API, Lambda/Fargate origin
- Firecracker: homepage
- CreateOS sandbox security
- CreateOS egress rules
- CreateOS self-hosting
See CreateOS Sandbox for yourself
Book a demo, or explore the Sandbox and its pricing.