Head to head · Sandbox code · October 2026 research run
Blaxel Sandboxes vs E2B
E2B has a score of 68.5 (B) against Blaxel Sandboxes's 61 (C). Both do sandbox code. The largest gap is reliability, 25 points.
Which one, for what
Pick Blaxel Sandboxes for
- agent ergonomics (+5)
Pick E2B for
- reliability (+25)
- schema & documentation (+12)
- payments & pricing (+10)
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Blaxel Sandboxes | E2B | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 35 | 60 | E2B +25 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 80 | 92 | E2B +12 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 70 | 65 | Blaxel Sandboxes +5 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 64 | 62 | Blaxel Sandboxes +2 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 40 | 50 | E2B +10 |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 85 | 88 | E2B +3 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 68 | 71 | E2B +3 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | 61 · C | 68.5 · B |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Blaxel Sandboxes | E2B |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Blaxel | E2B |
| Hosted endpoint | https://api.blaxel.ai/v0 | https://api.e2b.app |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP | HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth or key | API key |
| Pricing | Pay per use | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Tools exposed | none | none |
| Context cost (tools/list) | n/a | n/a |
| p95 latency | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Availability (30d) | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| MCP registry | not listed | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-09-30 | 2026-10-01 |
| Popularity | 27 stars, 353k npm/wk, 75k PyPI/wk | 13k stars, 2.2M npm/wk, 1.4M PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 2/5 (2) | 3/5 (2) |
Verdicts
Blaxel Sandboxes
No compute charge in standby, only $0.20 a GB-month of snapshot storage. 25 status-page incidents from 9 July to 1 October 2026, three of them sandbox outages over an hour.
E2B
Firecracker microVM with its own kernel per sandbox. Two major incidents over an hour in September 2026, on sandbox creation and on creating from snapshots.
Before you call either
Blaxel Sandboxes
- Close WebSocket and terminal connections when done. An open connection keeps the sandbox active and billed
- Set a TTL or idle expiry on throwaway sandboxes. The default is to keep them
- Set
forbiddenDomainsor an allow list at creation, withnetwork.firewallfor tools that ignore proxy settings. Both can only be set when the sandbox is created - Retry only on WORKLOAD_UNAVAILABLE. The error reference says other codes won't succeed on retry
- Connect to
<sandbox URL>/mcpwith your API key instead of wrapping the REST API in tools yourself
E2B
- Set a timeout when you create a sandbox. The default is 5 minutes
- Pause rather than kill when you'll come back. Resume takes about a second and nothing is billed while paused
- Use
Secret.fillin network transforms instead of passing API keys into the sandbox environment - Pace sandbox creation. Hobby allows 1 a second and 20 running at once
- Move to the v2 sandbox endpoints. SDK 2.51.0 and later use them by default
Other comparisons with Blaxel Sandboxes or E2B
Machine-readable
/api/v1/tools/blaxel-sandboxes.json·/api/v1/tools/e2b.json- This page as Markdown,
/compare/blaxel-sandboxes-vs-e2b.md