Deno Sandbox vs E2B

Deno Sandbox

Secrets stay outside the microVM and are substituted only on outbound requests to approved hosts, and an allowlist limits egress. The service is still in beta, sandboxes need the $20 Pro plan, lifetime is capped at 30 minutes, and no sandbox operation appears in the published OpenAPI document.

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.

Deno Sandbox

1. Set DENO_DEPLOY_TOKEN to an organisation token (prefix ddo_) from Settings in console.deno.com. The organisation must be on Pro or above
2. Pass allowNet on every Sandbox.create(). The Security page says outbound access is unrestricted when it is omitted
3. Pass credentials through secrets with a hosts list, not env, so code in the VM sees only a placeholder
4. The default timeout ends the VM when the client disconnects. Pass a duration such as "10m" and reconnect with Sandbox.connect({ id }), up to 30 minutes
5. Create volumes in ord and start the sandbox in ord. A volume mounts only in its own region
6. exposeHttp URLs are public with no authentication. Treat the random subdomain as a secret

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