E2B vs Runloop Devboxes

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.

Runloop Devboxes

Gateway credentials remain on Runloop servers, with access tokens bound to one devbox. Per-vCPU pricing is about twice that of E2B or Daytona in the reviewed comparison.

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

Runloop Devboxes

1. Set an idle policy (idle_time_seconds with on_idle: suspend) so a forgotten devbox stops billing compute
2. Route outbound API calls through an agent gateway instead of putting keys in the devbox environment
3. Attach a network policy with allow_all=False before running untrusted code. Egress is open by default
4. Restart background services after every resume. Nothing in memory survives
5. Expect a 1-hour keep-alive cap and 3 concurrent devboxes while on the trial