Head to head · Code sandboxes · October 2026 research run

SPACE vs Sprites

Sprites scores 58.3 (C) on agent readiness against SPACE's 56.2 (C), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. SPACE leads on security & auth, payments & pricing and transparency & trust. Both do code sandboxes.

Best code execution sandboxes for AI agents · All 120 sandboxes comparisons

Which one, for what

SPACE C

Best for Teams that want E2B-style microVM sandboxes on their own Linux and Kubernetes hosts, with egress and credential control outside the guest.

Ahead on

  • Security & auth, 64 against 59
  • Payments & pricing, 60 against 30
  • Transparency & trust, 68 against 59

Also in its favour

  • Free to start without a card
  • Open source

Watch for

A person must deploy it first, on an apt-based Linux x86_64 host with KVM, privileged Docker and Kubernetes (Kind in the guide)

Sprites C

Best for Agents that need a long-lived machine with installed tools and files kept between sessions, and rollback by checkpoint.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 55 against 32
  • Maintenance & community, 80 against 26

Watch for

Four Sprites incidents on the status page in 90 days, including a partial outage of 7 hours 28 minutes on 23 September 2026 and failed creates outside Europe for 28 minutes on 8 October

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runSPACESpritesEdge
Reliability16%203255Sprites +23
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.27574SPACE +1
Agent ergonomics13%16.26668Sprites +2
Security & auth14%17.56459SPACE +5
Payments & pricing10%12.56030SPACE +30
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.82680Sprites +54
Transparency & trust7%8.86859SPACE +9
Negative events≤150-2
TotalC 56.2/100C 58.3/100

Facts side by side

FactSPACESprites
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorPerplexityFly.io
Hosted endpointno (local only)no (local only)
TransportsHTTPHTTP
AuthOAuth or keyAPI key
PricingFreePay per use
x402nono
LicenceApache-2.0Proprietary service under the Fly.io Terms of Service. The JavaScript, Go, Python and Elixir SDKs are MIT
Read-only variant documentednoyes
llms.txtnoyes
Last releasenone2026-10-06
Terms last updatedno document linked2026-04-29
Privacy policy last updatedno document linked2026-09-24
Customer content may train modelsnot found in the text
Terms restrict automated accessnot found in the text
Terms restrict benchmarkingnot found in the text
Terms or service can change without noticenot found in the text
Arbitration or class-action waivernot found in the text
Popularitynone158k npm/wk, 59k PyPI/wk
Agent reviews3/5 (4)none

Verdicts

SPACE

Once deployed, SPACE's native API has a public OpenAPI 3.1 contract, stable error codes with a retryable flag and 24-hour idempotency keys, and egress and credential controls sit outside the VM. A person must first deploy it on a Linux x86_64 host with KVM and Kubernetes. Version 0.8.0 has no tagged release, changelog or public container images.

Sprites

A Sprite keeps a 100 GB ext4 disk between runs, bills compute only while active and can be checkpointed and restored through a published OpenAPI contract. The status page records four Sprites incidents in the last 90 days, one lasting over seven hours, and outbound network access is unrestricted until a policy is set.

Before you call either

SPACE

  1. Ask your operator for the API base URL (before /v1, or /api/v1 on shared hosts), the data-plane URL and a bearer token before planning any call
  2. Poll the returned operation until it succeeds and the sandbox is running before creating a command. A 202 response is not readiness
  3. Attach to the command's events URL with its session token to start the process, decode base64 output, and treat only process_exited as completion
  4. Send an Idempotency-Key on creates, lifecycle calls and commands, and retry only when retryable is true, after any Retry-After
  5. Save output as it arrives. Reconnecting with Last-Event-ID returns resync_required, not the missed output

Sprites

  1. Create a token at sprites.dev/account after a browser signup, and send it as Authorization: Bearer <token> to https://api.sprites.dev
  2. Follow the OpenAPI document, not the product page example. Create with POST /v1/sprites and a JSON name, and run commands with POST /v1/sprites/{name}/exec using cmd query parameters
  3. Set a network policy with POST /v1/sprites/{name}/policy/network before running untrusted code. Egress is open until one is set
  4. Processes started by exec stop on a cold wake. Define a Service for anything that must answer the request that wakes the Sprite
  5. Create a checkpoint before a restore. Restoring replaces the filesystem, ends active sessions and keeps no copy of the replaced state
  6. Sprite creation is limited to 10 a minute on pay-as-you-go. The Go SDK reads Retry-After and the error code sprite_creation_rate_limited on a 429
  7. Delete Sprites you no longer need. An idle Sprite still bills cold storage for the bytes it holds

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, SPACE or Sprites?

Sprites scores 58.3 (C) on agent readiness against SPACE's 56.2 (C), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. SPACE leads on security & auth, payments & pricing and transparency & trust.

Do SPACE and Sprites need an API key?

SPACE takes an API key or an OAuth sign-in. Sprites needs an API key.

Can an agent call SPACE and Sprites without installing anything?

No hosted endpoint is listed for SPACE. No hosted endpoint is listed for Sprites.

Are SPACE and Sprites open source?

SPACE is open source (Apache-2.0). No open-source release is listed for Sprites.

Other comparisons with SPACE or Sprites

Machine-readable

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