Alternatives to E2B

E2B alternatives for running AI-generated code

E2B is Apache-2.0 across two repositories and has the most polished sandbox developer experience in this category. The reason teams look elsewhere is narrower than roundups suggest: concurrency and session length are pricing tiers. Self-hosting is more paved than it is usually described, with a documented Terraform path, though the commercial product stays hosted-only. Here is what else is credible, including one project whose stars badly misrepresent its status.

Reviewed 31 August 2026. Licences and commit activity from each project's repository and the GitHub API, prices and limits from each vendor's own pricing page, and Modal's sandbox rates and isolation from its Sandbox documentation rather than its headline compute rates. E2B's homepage gives two different startup figures, less than 200 ms and 80 ms, so we cite neither as authoritative. The Beam entry is reported rather than verified and is flagged as such.

Why teams look for an alternative

Concurrency is a pricing tier: Hobby caps at 20 concurrent sandboxes and Pro at 100, with extra concurrency purchasable up to 1,100. Agent workloads are bursty, so the ceiling is usually the first constraint teams hit, and hitting it is a procurement conversation rather than a scaling one.
Session length is tiered: Up to 1 hour on Hobby and up to 24 hours on Pro. Long-running agent sessions run into this.
Self-hosting is documented, but it is not what you buy: E2B publishes a root-level self-host.md with a Terraform deployment: GCP is GA, AWS is beta, and Azure and generic Linux are listed unchecked. It expects a Cloudflare account and domain, Postgres, Packer and Terraform 1.7.5. The commercial product and pricing page are hosted-only, so this is a path you take on your own rather than one you are supported on.

The alternatives

Daytona

A fast, well-designed sandbox runtime with sub-90ms starts and mature stateful snapshots.

71,871 GitHub stars, the highest count in this category
Documents sandboxes starting in under 90 milliseconds from code to execution
Stateful environment snapshots for persistent agent sessions
Hosted product is actively developed
Licence file deleted in June 2026; GitHub reports the repository licence as none

Best for: Teams who want their hosted product, or where cold start is the binding constraint. It documents sub-90ms starts.

Watch out: The open source repository is no longer maintained. Its README states that as of June 2026 core development moved to a private codebase and the repository will receive no further updates, fixes or releases. The licence went with it: Apache-2.0 at the first commit in February 2024, AGPL-3.0 from April 2025, then the LICENSE file deleted on 23 June 2026, leaving the last open release, v0.190.0, as the AGPL-3.0 tag the README points forks at. Isolation is contested too: their documentation says default sandboxes are Linux containers, while the README claims a dedicated kernel. Their hosted product is unaffected.

Full Daytona comparison

Modal

General serverless compute with first-class GPU support and published per-second rates.

Not open source, no self-hosting or on-premises option documented
Sandboxes and Notebooks bill CPU at $0.00003942 per core per second and memory at $0.00000667 per GiB per second, roughly three times Modal's standard compute rate of $0.0000131 and $0.00000222
GPUs from $0.000164 per second (Nvidia T4) to $0.001972 (B300)
Starter $0 plus compute with $30 monthly credits, Team $250 plus compute
gVisor isolation, a five minute default sandbox lifetime configurable to 24 hours, and real network controls: block_network, an outbound CIDR allowlist, and no access to other workspace resources

Best for: Anyone who needs GPUs. No self-hosted option in this category offers managed GPU compute, so this is not a close call.

Watch out: It is general compute rather than an agent sandbox specifically, and it is cloud-only. Do not model costs off Modal's headline compute rate either: Sandboxes are priced roughly three times higher.

Full Modal comparison

Beam

Positions itself as an open-source E2B alternative with Docker-based sandboxing and GPU support.

Reported as open source and self-hostable with no session time limits
Docker-based isolation rather than microVMs
Supports Python and Node.js

Best for: Teams wanting a self-hostable option with GPU support, if the reported details hold up.

Watch out: We did not verify Beam's licence file or pricing page directly, unlike everything else on this page. Treat this entry as a starting point for your own check. If Docker-based isolation is accurate, weigh that against microVMs for untrusted code.

Everstack

Ours

Sandboxes that ship as part of a control plane covering the gateway, agent runtime and evaluations.

Apache-2.0 across the platform, no enterprise directory
Docker, Firecracker microVM and Kubernetes backends
Concurrency bounded by the capacity you provision, not a plan tier
Self-hosting is the documented default path

Best for: Teams who hit E2B's concurrency ceiling, or who need execution inside their own compliance boundary, and who also want the model call that produced the code in the same trace.

Watch out: E2B's sandbox developer experience is more mature and its community is larger. If sandboxing is your only problem, adopting a platform to get one is over-buying.

Full Everstack comparison

How to choose

01
What is the isolation primitive?
For untrusted, model-generated code, containers alone are a weaker boundary than most teams assume, because container escapes are a recurring vulnerability class. MicroVMs are where this category has converged, and for good reason. If a vendor is vague about this, pin it down first.
02
Can you actually self-host, or only in principle?
There is a real difference between a documented Terraform path the commercial product does not cover (E2B), a repository whose licence file has been deleted and that ships no further fixes (Daytona), and self-hosting being the default supported path (Everstack). All three get described as self-hostable in roundups, including this one until you read the detail.
03
Is the project still shipping?
Check the commit history and the LICENSE file, not the star count. Daytona is the cautionary example here: 71,871 stars attached to a tree that stopped moving in June 2026, and whose licence file was deleted in the same month. A README written last year says nothing about whether anyone is fixing CVEs today.
04
How is concurrency priced?
This is the constraint teams hit first. A tiered ceiling turns a scaling event into a procurement event, which is fine if you know about it in advance and painful if you find out during a launch.

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