E2B vs Daytona
Compute pricing is effectively identical, so choose on isolation and trust: pick E2B for Firecracker microVM isolation with a dedicated kernel per sandbox and an actively maintained self-hosting path. Pick Daytona for faster claimed creation (sub-90ms vs ~150ms), GPU sandboxes, broader SDK coverage, and no subscription gating — if you can accept container-based isolation and a company that took its core development private in June 2026.
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Side by side
E2B
DaytonaE2B and Daytona are the two most direct competitors in this roundup: both are purpose-built for running AI-agent-generated code, both bill per-second, and — remarkably — both publish the same headline compute rates: $0.000014 per vCPU-second and $0.0000045 per GiB-second (about $0.05/vCPU-hr and $0.016/GiB-hr). Price won't decide this one. Four other things will.
Isolation. E2B runs Firecracker microVMs: each sandbox gets a dedicated kernel behind a hardware-virtualization boundary. Daytona uses the Sysbox container runtime with Linux user namespaces — sandbox root maps to an unprivileged host user, but the host kernel is shared. Third-party comparisons consistently characterize this as Docker/gVisor-style container isolation. For code written by your own agents, that may be fine; for genuinely hostile or multi-tenant untrusted code, E2B's boundary is categorically stronger. Note that Daytona's own docs are somewhat vague here ("container and/or microVM technology"), with Sysbox being the concretely named mechanism.
GPUs. Daytona offers GPU sandboxes — H100, RTX 4090, RTX 5090, RTX PRO 6000 — for inference, fine-tuning, and CUDA workloads. E2B offers none: Firecracker lacks PCIe passthrough, and E2B's blog says GPU work stopped for 2025. This is the flip side of the isolation trade — the microVM architecture that makes E2B stronger on security is exactly what blocks its GPU story.
Plan structure. E2B gates meaningful limits behind its $150/mo Pro plan: Hobby caps continuous sessions at 1 hour (24 hours on Pro) and concurrency at 20 sandboxes (100 on Pro, up to 1,100 by add-on). Daytona is pure usage-based billing with no subscription tier gating features, no published hard runtime cap (just a configurable 15-minute idle auto-stop), and a bigger no-card free credit ($200 vs E2B's $100). Daytona also covers more languages: Python, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, and Java SDKs plus REST and CLI, versus E2B's Python and JS SDKs plus REST.
Open source and longevity. Here the positions invert. E2B's core is Apache-2.0 with a documented Terraform self-hosting guide, actively maintained. Daytona's public repo is AGPLv3 with Helm charts — technically self-hostable — but its README states that as of June 2026 core development moved to a private codebase. Self-hosting Daytona now means running a frozen fork that no longer tracks the commercial product. If open-source insurance against vendor risk matters to you, E2B is the only real option of the two.
Speed. Daytona claims sub-90ms sandbox creation against E2B's ~150ms via snapshot restore. Both are vendor marketing numbers without published benchmark methodology, and at this scale the difference is unlikely to matter for most agent workloads — treat it as a tiebreaker, not a decider.
Bottom line. With pricing identical, this is a straight trade: E2B sells a stronger isolation boundary and a credible open-source exit path, but charges $150/mo for production-grade limits and can't do GPUs. Daytona sells speed, GPU access, more SDKs, and friction-free usage pricing, but on a shared-kernel container runtime and with its open-source story effectively closed. Decide based on how untrusted your code really is.