Shells vs Daytona
Lifecycle safety and MCP depth, side by side.
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.
The matrix
Dimension by dimension.
Green check marks where we believe one side has a real edge. A dash means it's genuinely close — read the words, not just the dots.
Isolation model
Shells
wasm / container / microvm classes selected per shell; sealed networking default.
Daytona
Container-based sandboxes with fast snapshot/start; runner-based architecture.
Agent / MCP integration
Shells
First-party MCP server, agent gate (POST /api/agent/invoke) with entitlement checks.
Daytona
SDKs aimed at agent frameworks; MCP integration exists but tooling is broader than deep.
Lifecycle safety
Shells
snapshot / wipe_state / reinstall_os as named, confirmed, recorded capabilities.
Daytona
Snapshotting is a core strength; destructive-action ergonomics are SDK-level.
Credentials handling
Shells
Minutes-TTL term credentials, masked by default in the console.
Daytona
API keys per workspace/org; you rotate them.
Deployment model
Shells
Managed only, on Omega with Keystone tenancy.
Daytona
Open-core with self-host options — a real advantage if you must run it yourself.
Pricing model
Shells
Per-second by isolation class, flat Pro fee, free lifecycle actions.
Daytona
Usage-based managed tiers; self-host changes the math entirely.
Choose Daytona when…
- Self-hosting is a hard requirement — their open-core model is genuinely good for that.
- Your workflows are git-and-IDE shaped dev environments as much as agent sandboxes.
- You want to customize the runner/infrastructure layer yourself.
Yes, we mean it. Wrong-fit customers are expensive for everyone.
Choose Shells when…
- You want tenancy and entitlements enforced by the platform, not deployment discipline.
- Short-lived, masked credentials and recorded destructive actions matter for your audit posture.
- You want one consistent contract across console, SDK, REST, and MCP.
- wasm-class sandboxes for high-frequency, low-cost agent runs.
Migration notes
Moving from Daytona
The honest version: most migrations are a week of mapping calls, not a quarter of replatforming.
Workspace/sandbox create calls map to ShellsClient.create with a language preset.
Daytona snapshots map to the snapshot capability; add wipe_state where you used delete-and-recreate.
Move agent access from per-framework SDK glue to the MCP server config (npx @l1fe/shells-mcp).
If you self-hosted for data placement, talk to us about dedicated regions before migrating.