E2B vs Daytona
Two sandbox platforms for running code your agents wrote and nobody reviewed. One names its isolation mechanism and publishes every rate. The other has the better statefulness story and a partly unreadable price list.
Checked against both vendors' own sites, documentation, and repositories as of July 2026
Neither of These Is a Development Environment
Both keep appearing on CDE shortlists. Neither belongs on one.
If you are trying to get a team off local laptops, stop here. Neither product offers a per-developer workspace, an assigned machine, or a persistent place for an engineer to work a full day. The consumer of both is a program, reached through an SDK. The page you want is the CDE tools comparison.
E2B provides sandboxes that a program creates on demand, runs code inside, and discards. Its own description of the isolation is unusually concrete: each sandbox is a Firecracker microVM, which is a mechanism you can reason about rather than an adjective. Daytona sells the same broad thing with a different emphasis - stateful sandboxes that agents create, snapshot, fork, and resume - and its homepage headline is "Run AI Code".
Daytona reaching this category is a repositioning rather than a starting point, and it is worth dating accurately because so many comparison tables have not. Daytona announced the change publicly on 04-17-2025 in a post titled "From Dev Environments to AI Runtimes", which states that the company realigned its focus from developer environment inconsistencies for humans to runtimes for AI agents, and dates the internal inflection to December 2024. E2B has been building for this workload from the start.
At a Glance
Where a row says "not published" or "not retrievable", that is the finding rather than an omission
| Dimension | E2B | Daytona |
|---|---|---|
| Stated isolation mechanism | Firecracker microVM, named explicitly | Described as secure and elastic infrastructure. Ask for the mechanism in writing. |
| Differentiating capability | A hardware isolation boundary you can put in front of a security reviewer | Snapshot, fork, and resume of sandbox state; programmatic desktop control; Windows sandboxes |
| License of the code that runs the workload | Apache-2.0, actively developed | Proprietary since June 2026. See the repository note below. |
| Self-hosting | Documented Terraform deployment. Google Cloud and AWS are the documented targets; AWS is marked beta. | No. Custom regions are compute you provide; the control plane stays Daytona's. |
| Free tier | Hobby: one-time $100 in credits, sessions up to 1 hour, up to 20 concurrent sandboxes, 10 GiB storage | $200 in free compute credits on signup; storage priced per GiB after the first 5 GiB free |
| Paid plan | Pro at $150 per month plus usage: sessions up to 24 hours, 100 concurrent sandboxes, purchasable to 1,100, 20 GiB storage | Pay as you go on reserved vCPU, RAM, and disk, with volume discounts and tier-gated capacity |
| Usage rates | Published in full: $0.000014 per vCPU-second and $0.0000045 per GiB-second, billed per second | Windows at $0.0858 per vCPU-hour. Linux rates render client-side and are not publicly retrievable. |
| Enterprise pricing | Not published | Not published |
| If the vendor stops | You hold Apache-2.0 source and a documented path to a running deployment | Service ends. The public repository is unmaintained and receives no further updates. |
| Funding and status | Young company, active, one of seven hosted sandbox clients shipped in OpenAI's Agents SDK for Python on 04-15-2026 | $24M Series A led by FirstMark Capital announced 02-05-2026; also one of the seven |
Sources: e2b.dev/pricing, github.com/e2b-dev/E2B, daytona.io/pricing, github.com/daytonaio/daytona, and Daytona's 04-17-2025 repositioning announcement, all checked in July 2026. Citation standard: sources.
Isolation: One Names the Mechanism
For a product whose entire purpose is running untrusted code, this is the comparison that matters
E2B says Firecracker. That is a virtual machine monitor built to run many short-lived, minimal virtual machines, and it means each sandbox gets its own guest kernel behind a hypervisor rather than sharing a host kernel through namespaces and cgroups. Whether or not you conclude it is enough, it is a claim with an architecture attached, which you can evaluate, compare, and hold a vendor to.
Daytona describes secure and elastic infrastructure for running AI-generated code. That is a description of the outcome, not the mechanism. If your workload is genuinely adversarial - arbitrary model-generated code executing at volume, or code submitted by your own users - the difference between hardware virtualization, kernel-level sandboxing, and ordinary containers with a confident name determines whether a container escape is a bug or a breach. Get the answer in writing before you sign, from either vendor.
Specificity is the standard
"Secure sandbox" is marketing. A named hypervisor is an architecture. The useful thing E2B does for this whole category is set a bar that any competitor can meet simply by being as specific.
Isolation is not the whole threat model
Neither product stops code reaching the internet, exfiltrating a secret you injected, or burning your budget in a loop. Network egress policy and credential scoping stay yours on both. See agent egress control.
Statefulness is a real advantage
Daytona's snapshot, fork, and resume model lets an agent branch from a known state rather than rebuilding it. For evaluation runs producing many variants of one starting point, that is a substantial saving and not something a security comparison should obscure.
Pricing: One Complete Rate Card, One Partial
The gap is not a criticism of Daytona's business. It is a limit on what a comparison can honestly say.
E2B publishes enough to model the workload
Per-second rates are hard to feel, so convert them. Arithmetic on E2B's published figures: $0.000014 per vCPU-second is $0.0504 per vCPU-hour, and $0.0000045 per GiB-second is $0.0162 per GiB-hour. A default two-vCPU sandbox with 4 GiB of RAM therefore runs about $0.166 per hour, which makes a thirty-second agent task a fraction of a cent. Whatever else is true, you can put that in a spreadsheet before you write any integration code.
Daytona's Linux rates cannot be retrieved from the published page
The Windows sandbox rate of $0.0858 per vCPU-hour is present in the served page, along with the $200 signup credit and the note that storage is priced per GiB after the first 5 GiB free. The Linux vCPU, RAM, and disk rates are not: that table renders client-side and does not appear in the retrievable page or the documentation. This site will not substitute a number from a comparison article to fill the gap, so if you need to model Daytona's Linux cost, get the rates signed in or from a quote.
Both products fail in the same way, and it is not the way a CDE fails. Nobody overspends here by leaving one sandbox running. They overspend by shipping a loop that forgets to close them, at which point usage billing across hundreds of concurrent sandboxes compounds quickly. Enforce lifetimes in your own code, alert on concurrent sandbox count, and treat plan concurrency ceilings as a backstop rather than a budget. See FinOps and agent fleets.
Check the capacity ceiling before designing a high-concurrency harness around either. E2B caps concurrent sandboxes by plan, at 20 on Hobby and 100 on Pro with more purchasable to 1,100. Daytona's limits step up with account verification and prepaid balance, starting at 10 vCPU, 20 GiB RAM, and 30 GiB storage.
Who Should Choose Which
Concrete conditions, including the case where the answer is neither
Choose E2B when
- A security reviewer needs a named isolation mechanism rather than an assurance, and Firecracker is an answer you can defend.
- Continuity matters: you want Apache-2.0 source and a documented self-hosting path so the worst case is operating it yourself rather than rebuilding.
- You must model cost before writing integration code, and a complete published rate card is a procurement requirement.
- Execution must stay in your own Google Cloud or AWS account, and you have the platform capacity to run a microVM fleet.
- Your workload is many short, stateless tasks where a fresh sandbox each time is the natural shape.
Choose Daytona when
- Forking sandbox state to branch agent trajectories is a first-class need, which is the capability E2B does not match.
- Your agents need a controllable graphical desktop, which is a genuinely uncommon capability in this category.
- You need Windows sandboxes, where Daytona has a shipped product and a published rate.
- Long evaluation runs benefit from resuming a known state rather than rebuilding it, and the saving outweighs the pricing opacity.
- You want to start against a credit balance rather than a contract, and $200 covers your first experiments.
Choose neither when your existing infrastructure already contains the blast radius
If your agent work already runs inside a CI runner or a CDE workspace with scoped credentials and controlled egress, a second vendor may add cost without adding protection. The question to answer first is whether the code is adversarial by assumption or merely automated. Automated code written by your own agents against your own repositories, running in an environment that already has a boundary, is a different problem from executing arbitrary model output at volume - and only the second one clearly justifies a dedicated sandbox provider. Kubernetes agent sandboxes covers whether your existing cluster can do this job.
What Cannot Be Compared
Including two cases where a vendor's own pages disagree with themselves
Cost per task
Not computable. Daytona's Linux rates are not publicly retrievable and both Enterprise tiers are unpublished, so no per-task or per-hour figure can be placed side by side. The E2B side alone can be modeled; the comparison cannot.
Sandbox startup time
Both publish startup claims and neither has been independently benchmarked here. Daytona states sandbox creation in under 90 ms from code to execution, presented as a platform-wide figure rather than scoped to a particular runtime - which is worth noting given that it also sells Windows sandboxes. E2B's own marketing copy carries two different numbers, quoting both under 200 ms and 80 ms for a client in the same region. No figure from either vendor is endorsed on this page.
Escape resistance
No published adversarial testing comparing these two platforms was found. A hypervisor boundary is a stronger architecture than a shared kernel, which is an argument from design rather than from measurement - and the difference matters, because design arguments can be wrong in implementation.
The self-hosting support matrix
E2B's infrastructure repository lists Google Cloud, AWS, Azure, and a general Linux machine, but marks only Google Cloud and AWS as supported, with AWS in beta, and the self-hosting guide documents only those two. Treat Azure and generic Linux as roadmap items rather than as documented paths until that changes.
Daytona's repository, described precisely
This one gets reported inaccurately in both directions, so here is the careful version. The daytonaio/daytona repository is still public and has not been archived. It carries a notice that it is no longer maintained, that core development moved to a private codebase as of June 2026, and that it will receive no further updates, fixes, or releases. Daytona's own post says it will stay public so anyone who wants to keep using it, fork it, or build on it can do so.
The part usually missed: the source has been removed from the default branch, which now holds essentially a README and assets, and GitHub detects no license there. The AGPL-3.0 license file is present on tagged releases. Anyone intending to depend on that code must pin a tag rather than the default branch. Even then, unmaintained infrastructure software accumulates unpatched dependencies immediately, and adopting it means becoming its maintainer.
Related
The reviews behind this page, and the CDEs neither product is
Self-Hosted vs Managed
The framework for the CDE decision that neither of these products belongs in
E2B Review
Firecracker isolation, Apache-2.0, and the lowest exit cost in this directory
Daytona Review
Why it left the CDE category, and what the current product actually is
MicroVM Isolation
How Firecracker and its peers work, and when the extra boundary earns its cost
Sandbox Environments
Evaluating providers on isolation mechanisms rather than adjectives
Kubernetes Agent Sandboxes
Whether your existing cluster already does this job well enough
Agent Fleets
Concurrency ceilings, lifecycle discipline, and runaway usage billing
Coder vs GitHub Codespaces
Where to go if what you actually wanted was a workspace for people
Open Source CDEs
The durability tests to run before trusting any permissive license
Sources and Citations
Every figure on this site with its publisher, date, and link