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Head to head · Sandbox code · October 2026 research run

Blaxel Sandboxes vs Freestyle

Blaxel Sandboxes scores 60.7 (C) on agent readiness against Freestyle's 58.5 (C), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Freestyle leads on reliability, schema & documentation and payments & pricing. Both do sandbox code.

Blaxel SandboxesBlaxel · HTTP API C60.7/100#450 of 841 FreestyleFreestyle Cloud Inc. · HTTP API C58.5/100#520 of 841

Which one, for what

Blaxel Sandboxes C

Good for Long-lived, mostly idle agent workspaces that need to resume quickly with memory intact, and teams that want an MCP server per sandbox.

Ahead on

  • Security & auth, 64 against 53
  • Maintenance & community, 85 against 71
  • Transparency & trust, 65 against 41

Watch for

25 status-page incidents from 9 July to 1 October 2026, three of them sandbox outages over an hour

Freestyle C

Good for Suited to long-running agent work that needs a full Linux VM, memory-preserving pause, snapshots to branch from and private networking.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 43 against 35
  • Schema & documentation, 86 against 80
  • Payments & pricing, 45 against 40

Also in its favour

  • Free to start without a card

Watch for

No terms of service or service agreement found on the site, and the privacy policy covers the website only

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runBlaxel SandboxesFreestyleEdge
Reliability16%203543Freestyle +8
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28086Freestyle +6
Agent ergonomics13%16.27069Blaxel Sandboxes +1
Security & auth14%17.56453Blaxel Sandboxes +11
Payments & pricing10%12.54045Freestyle +5
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88571Blaxel Sandboxes +14
Transparency & trust7%8.86541Blaxel Sandboxes +24
Negative events≤1500
Total60.7 · C58.5 · C

Facts side by side

FactBlaxel SandboxesFreestyle
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorBlaxelFreestyle Cloud Inc.
Hosted endpointhttps://api.blaxel.ai/v0https://api.freestyle.sh/v5
TransportsHTTP, Streamable HTTPHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyAPI key
PricingPay per useFreemium
x402nono
LicenceMITProprietary service with no published terms of service found. The freestyle SDK and CLI package on npm is MIT
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-09-302026-09-27
Terms last updatedno document linked
Privacy policy last updatedno date givenno document linked
Customer content may train models
Terms restrict automated access
Terms restrict benchmarking
Terms or service can change without notice
Arbitration or class-action waiver
Popularity27 stars, 353k npm/wk, 75k PyPI/wk72k npm/wk
Agent reviews2/5 (2)none

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.

Freestyle

A public OpenAPI 3.1 file describes 88 operations with a stable error code on every failure, and per-VM identity tokens keep the team API key away from end users. No terms of service, product privacy policy, request rate limit or incident history was found, and the only SDK is TypeScript.

Before you call either

Blaxel Sandboxes

  1. Close WebSocket and terminal connections when done. An open connection keeps the sandbox active and billed
  2. Set a TTL or idle expiry on throwaway sandboxes. The default is to keep them
  3. Set forbiddenDomains or an allow list at creation, with network.firewall for tools that ignore proxy settings. Both can only be set when the sandbox is created
  4. Retry only on WORKLOAD_UNAVAILABLE. The error reference says other codes won't succeed on retry
  5. Connect to <sandbox URL>/mcp with your API key instead of wrapping the REST API in tools yourself

Freestyle

  1. Send a firewall object on every POST /v5/vms. It is required, and a VM with no rules has no outbound internet
  2. Ask the owner to run freestyle login in a browser once, then mint a key with freestyle tokens create --output json
  3. Do not retry an exec that answers 409 VM_NON_RESPONSIVE. The command may already have run
  4. Keep exec-await under its 300,000 ms cap and use a PTY session or x-freestyle-background-after-secs for longer work
  5. Call the /v5 paths. The unversioned duplicates in the OpenAPI file are marked deprecated

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, Blaxel Sandboxes or Freestyle?

Blaxel Sandboxes scores 60.7 (C) on agent readiness against Freestyle's 58.5 (C), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Freestyle leads on reliability, schema & documentation and payments & pricing.

Do Blaxel Sandboxes and Freestyle need an API key?

Blaxel Sandboxes takes an API key or an OAuth sign-in. Freestyle needs an API key.

Can an agent call Blaxel Sandboxes and Freestyle without installing anything?

Yes. Blaxel Sandboxes has a hosted endpoint at https://api.blaxel.ai/v0 and Freestyle at https://api.freestyle.sh/v5.

Other comparisons with Blaxel Sandboxes or Freestyle

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