Modal Sandboxes vs Morph Cloud

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.

Morph Cloud

Pause and snapshot keep memory and running processes, and one call branches an instance into several copies. A public OpenAPI file covers 69 operations. No terms of service, privacy policy or security page was found, the free plan includes no compute credit, and the changelog holds one entry from November 2024.

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

Morph Cloud

1. Set ttl_seconds and ttl_action when starting an instance. Nothing in the docs stops an instance with no TTL from billing MCUs
2. Pass auth_mode: api_key when exposing an HTTP service. The default is none, which makes the URL public
3. Enable wake_on_ssh before calling exec on an instance that may be paused. There is no separate exec wake setting
4. Use /api/instance/list and /api/snapshot/list with page and limit (default 50, maximum 1,000). The plain list routes return everything
5. On a 503 from snapshot, branch, pause or reboot, wait for the Retry-After value before repeating the call