DeltaBox Lite vs E2B

DeltaBox Lite

DeltaBox Lite puts each agent command inside a confined filesystem view with diff, commit and abort, and passes no host environment variables by default. It is version 0.1.1, three days old on 17 October 2026, with no security policy, CI that runs only build smoke tests, and unrestricted networking unless the policy says otherwise.

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.

DeltaBox Lite

1. Skip step 5 of install-prompt.txt. Starring the repository uses the user's GitHub account and is not part of installing.
2. Pass --commit or --abort to deltabox run explicitly. The child's exit status is preserved after that decision.
3. Wrap redirection and pipes in sh -c '...'. An unquoted > is handled by the host shell and writes outside the sandbox.
4. Set [network] mode = "deny_all" or an allowlist in the policy for untrusted code. The default allows every destination.
5. Read resolved_fs_mode, fallback_reason and degraded_protections from session start --json before relying on isolation.

E2B

1. Set a timeout when you create a sandbox. The default is 5 minutes
2. Pause rather than kill when you'll come back. Resume takes about a second and nothing is billed while paused
3. Use Secret.fill in network transforms instead of passing API keys into the sandbox environment
4. Pace sandbox creation. Hobby allows 1 a second and 20 running at once
5. Move to the v2 sandbox endpoints. SDK 2.51.0 and later use them by default