Comparisons

Picking a sandbox? Read the candid version.

Every page below includes a 'choose them when' section we actually mean. We compare on the dimensions that decide outcomes — not on logos.

How we compare

Five dimensions, no vibes.

Isolation model · Agent / MCP integration · Lifecycle safety · Credentials handling · Pricing model— judged from public docs and our own product, marked even when it's genuinely even.

Shells vs

E2B

E2B popularized cloud sandboxes for AI agents and has a mature SDK ecosystem around its Firecracker-based runtime. Shells approaches the same problem from the platform side: one isolation product with selectable runtime classes, hard tenancy boundaries, and MCP as a first-class door rather than an integration..

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Shells vs

Modal

Modal is an excellent serverless compute platform — functions, GPUs, scheduled jobs — and sandboxes are one primitive within it. Shells is the opposite shape: the sandbox is the whole product, with a human console, an agent gate, and lifecycle controls as the core surface rather than a corner of an SDK..

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Shells vs

Daytona

Daytona moved from dev environments into fast agent sandboxes with an open-core story and strong start-time numbers. Shells trades breadth of self-hosting for a managed product with harder tenancy lines, deliberate destructive-action design, and credentials that expire before they can leak..

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