boxkiteA container pod you self-host, vs. a MicroVM you don't.
E2B is a polished, hosted-first sandbox built on Firecracker MicroVMs — genuinely strong developer experience and a real, hypervisor-level snapshot feature boxkite can't match. boxkite is the opposite bet: an open-source sandbox you run on your own Kubernetes cluster, so your agents' code and data never leave your infrastructure.
Feature by feature, without flattering either side
E2B is the market leader in hosted agent sandboxing, and some of its capabilities — memory-state snapshotting, GUI desktops, RL-scale fleets — aren't things boxkite is built to do. This table says so plainly rather than only listing rows where boxkite wins.
| boxkite | E2B | |
|---|---|---|
| Self-hostable | Yes — your own K8s cluster | No — hosted-first |
| Isolation primitive | K8s pod — namespaces/cgroups, non-root, dropped caps | Firecracker MicroVM — hypervisor-level |
| Data residency | Stays in your own infra | Runs on E2B's cloud — see their docs |
| Pause/resume with live state | No — filesystem-only, always cold-starts | Yes — RAM+CPU snapshot, resumes in <1s warm |
| Framework-agnostic tools | 15 core tools + opt-in git/Node.js sets | Code-interpreter-first SDK, per-provider guides |
| Model-provider quickstarts | OpenAI, Mistral, Groq, Gemini, Vercel AI SDK | OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Groq, Vercel AI SDK |
| Agent-framework adapters | LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, OpenAI Agents SDK, Vercel AI SDK | LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, Vercel AI SDK, native OpenAI Agents SDK |
| MCP integration shape | Inbound, OAuth 2.1 — Claude/Cursor drives a boxkite sandbox | Outbound — gateway to 200+ third-party MCP tools |
| Git operations | Opt-in, 8-op tool set | First-class SDK git methods |
| Secrets handling | Proxy-substitution + opt-in scrubbed env injection | Encrypted org-level secrets, outbound proxy substitution |
| Long-running processes / PTY | Background start/stop/watch, opt-in real PTY | Interactive stream control incl. PTY |
| Human-facing GUI / Computer Use | No — headless only, by design | Yes — Desktop VNC/GUI + computer-use agent |
| RL-scale fleets | Not the design target | Positioned (2026) for large-scale RL training |
| Vendor lock-in | None — you own the stack | Hosted dependency |
E2B wins cold start. That's the honest headline.
E2B's Firecracker microVMs cold-start in <200ms (same region; 80ms secure variant) (e2b.dev ↗) — genuinely faster to first byte than a Kubernetes pod, and we're not going to argue otherwise. boxkite doesn't compete there; it keeps a warm pool so a session is claimable in ~0.9s p50 / ~1.3s p95 and in-sandbox ops land in ~0.4s, both measured against our own API. The reason to pick boxkite isn't speed — it's that all of it runs on your own cluster, MIT-licensed, with no per-second meter running.
Warm session start
~0.9s p50 / ~1.3s p95
p50 877 ms · p95 1289 ms · n=10
In-sandbox exec
~0.4s
p50 419 ms · p95 509 ms · n=12
File operations
~0.4s
create/view/str_replace/grep, all ~0.4s p50 · n=6
boxkite figures measured against our hosted API on 2026-07-21; sample size shown per metric, client-side wall-clock, cluster warm and image cached. E2B's <200ms (same region; 80ms secure variant) is its own published cold-start claim under its own methodology, not a head-to-head reproduction. Methodology: /blog/measuring-session-start-latency.
The two products optimize for different constraints — E2B for hosted convenience and MicroVM-grade session continuity, boxkite for owning the whole stack.
Reach for E2B when you want zero operational surface, near-instant warm resume, or GUI/Computer-Use workloads, and you're fine with agent code running on E2B's infrastructure. Reach for boxkite when compliance, data residency, or already-running Kubernetes means the sandbox has to live inside your own cluster — and you still want a batteries-included bash/python/file/process tool surface on day one.
Two ways to run boxkite — same code
Both paths run identical control-plane/ code — pick the operational model that fits.
Self-host
The OSS repo, your cluster
docker compose for kicking the tires, or real Kubernetes for production — full control over the isolation model, data never leaves your cluster.
Hosted API
The beta control-plane
Try boxkite without standing up Kubernetes yourself — fair-use free tier, 20 sandbox-hours/month, 2 concurrent sandboxes, no billing yet.
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