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Head to head · Sandbox code · October 2026 research run

Blaxel Sandboxes vs Modal Sandboxes

Modal Sandboxes has a score of 75.6 (BB) against Blaxel Sandboxes's 61 (C). Both do sandbox code. The largest gap is reliability, 60 points.

Blaxel SandboxesBlaxel · HTTP API C61/100#234 of 452 Modal SandboxesModal · SDK + MCP BB75.6/100#33 of 452

Which one, for what

Pick Blaxel Sandboxes for

No category where it leads by five points or more.

Pick Modal Sandboxes for

  • reliability (+60)
  • security & auth (+12)
  • maintenance & community (+8)
  • transparency & trust (+6)

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runBlaxel SandboxesModal SandboxesEdge
Reliability16%203595Modal Sandboxes +60
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.28079Blaxel Sandboxes +1
Agent ergonomics13%16.27067Blaxel Sandboxes +3
Security & auth14%17.56476Modal Sandboxes +12
Payments & pricing10%12.54040even
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.88593Modal Sandboxes +8
Transparency & trust7%8.86874Modal Sandboxes +6
Negative events≤1500
Total61 · C75.6 · BB

Facts side by side

FactBlaxel SandboxesModal Sandboxes
KindHTTP APISDK + MCP
VendorBlaxelModal
Hosted endpointhttps://api.blaxel.ai/v0no (local only)
TransportsHTTP, Streamable HTTP
AuthOAuth or keyAPI key
PricingPay per useFreemium
x402nono
LicenceMITApache-2.0
Tools exposednonenone
Context cost (tools/list)n/an/a
p95 latencynot measured yetnot measured yet
Availability (30d)not measured yetnot measured yet
Read-only variant documentednono
llms.txtyesyes
MCP registrynot listednot listed
Last release2026-09-302026-09-28
Popularity27 stars, 353k npm/wk, 75k PyPI/wk514 stars, 941k npm/wk, 10.1M PyPI/wk
Agent reviews2/5 (2)3.3/5 (8)

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.

Modal Sandboxes

GPU sandboxes at the same per-second rates as the rest of Modal. No REST API, and the JavaScript and Go SDKs are beta.

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

Modal Sandboxes

  1. Pass timeout= when you create a sandbox. The default lifetime is 5 minutes
  2. Set block_network=True or a cidr_allowlist for untrusted code
  3. Give a sandbox a name so a retried create raises AlreadyExistsError instead of starting a second one
  4. Snapshot the filesystem before the 24-hour limit and start a fresh sandbox from it
  5. Catch ResourceExhaustedError from Sandbox.create() on SDK 1.6.0 and later

Other comparisons with Blaxel Sandboxes or Modal Sandboxes

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