# E2B vs Modal Sandboxes

> Modal Sandboxes has a score of 75.6 (BB) against E2B's 68.5 (B). Both do sandbox code. The largest gap is reliability, 35 points. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

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- Updated: 2026-10-05

Modal Sandboxes has a score of 75.6 (BB) against E2B's 68.5 (B). Both do sandbox code. The largest gap is reliability, 35 points.

- E2B: grade B, 68.5/100, rank #122 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/e2b.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/e2b.json
- Modal Sandboxes: grade BB, 75.6/100, rank #33 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/modal-sandboxes.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/modal-sandboxes.json

## Which one, for what

Pick E2B for schema & documentation (+13), payments & pricing (+10).

Pick Modal Sandboxes for reliability (+35), security & auth (+14), maintenance & community (+5).

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | E2B | Modal Sandboxes | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 60 | 95 | Modal Sandboxes +35 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 92 | 79 | E2B +13 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 65 | 67 | Modal Sandboxes +2 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 62 | 76 | Modal Sandboxes +14 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 50 | 40 | E2B +10 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 88 | 93 | Modal Sandboxes +5 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 71 | 74 | Modal Sandboxes +3 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **68.5 · B** | **75.6 · BB** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | E2B | Modal Sandboxes |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | SDK + MCP |
| Vendor | E2B | Modal |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.e2b.app` | no (local only) |
| Transports | HTTP |  |
| Auth | API key | API key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | 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 | 2026-10-01 | 2026-09-28 |
| Popularity | 13k stars, 2.2M npm/wk, 1.4M PyPI/wk | 514 stars, 941k npm/wk, 10.1M PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 3/5 (2) | 3.3/5 (8) |

## Verdicts

**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.

**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

### 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

### 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 E2B or Modal Sandboxes

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- [Modal Sandboxes vs Runloop Devboxes](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/modal-sandboxes-vs-runloop.md)
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