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Sandal vs Daytona

Daytona sells composable sandbox computers with snapshots, volumes, SSH and signed preview URLs across five SDK languages. Sandal is narrower on languages and wider on machines: the same client also hands an agent a CI runner, a desktop or an iOS simulator, at a tenth of the hourly rate and with pause-to-$0 between turns.

Start buildingSee the migration
Reviewed August 2026 · 3 sources
$ / hr · 4 vCPU 8 GiB
0.331Daytona0.036Sandal
Paused sandbox
BilledDaytona$0Sandal
SDK languages
5Daytona2Sandal
Surfaces on one SDK
LinuxDaytonaLinux · CI · mobileSandal
The honest split

Two good answers. Here is which one is yours.

Pick Daytona if
  • You need an SDK in Go, Ruby or another language beyond TypeScript and Python.
  • Your architecture leans on Daytona volumes, SSH into the sandbox, or region placement.
  • Your team already builds on Daytona’s lifecycle automation and it fits.
Pick Sandal if
  • You need the same API to also give the agent a CI runner, a desktop, or an iOS simulator.
  • Agents idle between turns and you refuse to pay wall-clock for a machine that is thinking.
  • Untrusted code needs its own kernel, default-deny egress and a key that dies with the machine.

Many teams run both. runs-on is per job and a sandbox is per task; nothing here is all or nothing.

Side by side

What each one actually ships.

Documented capability as of August 2026. Where the honest answer is a qualifier rather than yes or no, the qualifier is printed. Scroll sideways on a small screen.

Daytona compared with Sandal, August 2026
AreaDaytonaSandalWhy it matters
Runtime
Pause and resumeSnapshots capture state; a stopped sandbox is not free while it exists.Pause to $0 with memory intact; resume under 200 ms.Idle time between model turns is the bill.
Fork a machineNo public evidence.Copy-on-write forks of a running box.Exploring two approaches without rebuilding state.
PreviewsPublic and signed preview URLs for sandbox ports.Signed HTTPS preview URLs on any port.An agent that serves its own work needs to check it.
Isolation
RuntimeSandbox computers with dedicated kernels.Firecracker microVM with its own kernel; containers on the same fleet for one-shot code.Both isolate at the kernel, a tie worth saying out loud.
Pricing
BillingPer-second usage while the sandbox runs.Per second while the machine runs; paused costs nothing.Same granularity, different definition of “running”.
Surfaces
Beyond LinuxLinux sandboxes.Linux, Windows and macOS machines, CI runners, iOS and Android simulators, Xcode builds.The reason a mobile team ends up with three vendors.
Developer experience
AccessSSH access, volumes, region selection.Exec, filesystem API, preview URLs and a 60 fps desktop stream; no SSH by default.Dev-environment habits versus agent-runtime habits.
SDKsFive languages.TypeScript and Python, CLI, REST, MCP. A Daytona-shaped compat import in Python.Breadth of languages versus breadth of machines.
Sources · reviewed August 2026

Capabilities change and rates change. If something here is out of date, tell us and we will fix it the same week.

Price

Same shape. Two meters.

Published rates, August 2026, same instance shape. Check both pricing pages before you budget; rates change.

Daytona4 vCPU / 8 GiB
0.331$ / hour
Sandal4 vCPU / 8 GiB · paused = $0
0.036$ / hour
Price your own fleetThe full rate card
$0.00$2.22$4.45$6.67$8.900h6h12h18h24hAGENT WORKING · 5.8 H OF 24Daytona $7.94Sandal $0.21

One agent day on the published rates for the same shape: 5.8 hours of work in six bursts. The model keeps the Daytona sandbox alive between turns; snapshotting and recreating it is a different workflow.

Migration

One line changes.

A compatibility shim presents the SDK you already call. Change the import, keep the code, and run both vendors side by side until the numbers convince you.

agent.py−1 +1one line changes
-from daytona_sdk import Daytona
+from sandal.compat.daytona import Daytona
daytona = Daytona()
sandbox = daytona.create(language="python")
sandbox.process.exec("pytest -q")
sandbox.delete()
  1. 01≈ 1 min

    Install the shim

    pip install sandal. The compat module presents the Daytona client you already call.

  2. 02≈ 5 min

    Swap the import

    Change one line. Create, exec, files and delete keep their shape; volumes and SSH-specific calls throw with a hint.

  3. 03≈ 1 afternoon

    Run both, side by side

    Point one workload at each vendor and compare start time, exit codes and the bill for the same day.

Where Daytona is ahead

What we would rather you read here than find later.

A comparison page where the vendor wins every row is a brochure. These are real, and we would rather you land on the right tool than land on us and leave in a month.

  • 01

    Five SDK languages.

    If your stack is not TypeScript or Python, Daytona already speaks it. We ship two languages and a REST API.

  • 02

    SSH, volumes and regions.

    Daytona’s development-environment lineage shows in SSH access, persistent volumes and region placement. Our shape is exec, files and a desktop stream, with EU and US regions only.

Before you switch

Questions teams ask before moving off Daytona.

The sandal.compat.daytona module presents the Daytona client for the common surface, create, exec, files, previews and delete. Daytona-specific volume and SSH calls throw with a migration hint.

More comparisons

The rest of the field in sandboxes.

All comparisons and the full matrix →
Get started

Run the same job twice.

Point one workload at Sandal and one at Daytona. The numbers on this page are ours; the ones that matter are yours.

Start buildingRead the docs
npm i @sandal/sdk