Blaxel vs Morph Cloud
Both keep a sandbox's memory when it sleeps and cost almost nothing while it does. Blaxel runs small Firecracker microVMs that fall asleep on their own seconds after the last connection, while Morph Cloud runs full VMs with SSH that you can branch into many running copies.
The companies and products
Blaxel
Blaxel is a San Francisco company that runs cloud infrastructure for AI agents, and since September 2026 it is part of Baseten.
You get sandboxes, batch jobs, MCP server hosting and a model gateway. Each sandbox is a Firecracker microVM with its own kernel that drops to standby when nothing is connected and resumes in under 25 ms with its memory and running processes. It is built for agent products that start many sandboxes and want them asleep most of the time.
- Headquarters
- San Francisco, founded 2024
Morph Cloud
Morph Cloud sells full virtual machines for AI agents that can be snapshotted, branched and restored with their memory, which it calls Infinibranch.
You get MorphVM instances as low-level building blocks and Devboxes as ready workspaces on top of them, with SSH, preview URLs and a tmux API for running coding agents you install yourself. Everything is billed in MCUs, where one MCU is 1 vCPU, 4 GB of RAM or 16 GB of disk for an hour. It is built for teams that fan agents out from one saved state, and it also sells managed GitHub Actions runners and a shared filesystem.
- Regions
- Not published
Which use cases each one fits
For each use case, Battleships prices every sandbox provider on the same workload and sorts them from the cheapest monthly bill up. “10th cheapest of 367” means 9 of the other 366 providers run that workload, with every feature it needs, for less. “With limits” means the provider runs it but misses something, so it is listed after every full match. Open a use case for its whole ranking and what each provider misses.
| Use case and its workload | Blaxel: price rank | Morph Cloud: price rank | boat: price rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software factory 100 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 2,200 sessions of 8 h a month Blaxel fits this one fully, while Morph is a compromise; boat adds /dev/kvm for emulators and a disk saved every minute. | 10th cheapest of 367 $2,373 a month | 198th of 367, with limits $2,288 a month | 3rd cheapest of 367 $634 a month |
| Always-on AI employees 50 machines 24/7 · 2 vCPU / 4 GB | 12th cheapest of 366 $2,832 a month | 235th of 366, with limits $3,014 a month | 5th cheapest of 366 $657 a month |
| Code interpreter bursts 100 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 200,000 sessions of 1 min a month Both suit short code runs: Blaxel sleeps on its own seconds after the last connection, and Morph pauses with its memory and wakes on the next request. | 14th cheapest of 345 $144 a month | 16th cheapest of 345 $154 a month | 186th of 345, with limits $2,000 a month |
| Sandboxes for your users 300 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 30,000 sessions of 23 min a month Morph's Scale plan fits 300 users at once, while Blaxel's self-serve tiers stop at 200 at once; boat fits it on a self-serve plan too. | 101st of 361, with limits $926 a month | 12th cheapest of 361 $905 a month | Cheapest of 361 $209 a month |
| RL rollouts 1,000 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 1,000,000 sessions of 3 min a month Morph's memory branching suits rollouts that all start from the same running state. | 77th of 360, with limits $4,378 a month | 86th of 360, with limits $4,847 a month | 34th of 360, with limits $2,000 a month |
| Agent evals 250 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 15,000 sessions of 20 min a month | 136th of 364, with limits $704 a month | 38th cheapest of 364 $675 a month | 10th cheapest of 364 $200 a month |
| CI runners 40 at once · 8 vCPU / 16 GB · 6,000 sessions of 12 min a month | 57th cheapest of 377 $431 a month | 39th cheapest of 377 $355 a month | 4th cheapest of 377 $86 a month |
| 24/7 dev boxes 1 machine 24/7 · 4 vCPU / 8 GB Morph gives you SSH and systemd on a full VM, while Blaxel has no native SSH; boat is a plain machine you SSH into and leave on. | 265th of 368, with limits $114 a month | 85th cheapest of 368 $116 a month | 18th cheapest of 368 $26 a month |
| Computer-use agents 50 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 20,000 sessions of 15 min a month Blaxel ships a desktop and a browser for computer use, while on Morph you install the browser and the agent yourself; boat streams a 60fps desktop with Chromium. | 14th cheapest of 369 $634 a month | 182nd of 369, with limits $595 a month | 6th cheapest of 369 $200 a month |
| Browser-use agents 50 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 30,000 sessions of 10 min a month Blaxel has a browser ready, while Morph's docs have you run headless Chrome yourself in Docker and expose its debug port. | 16th cheapest of 367 $317 a month | 214th of 367, with limits $250 a month | 7th cheapest of 367 $200 a month |
| Scraping & bots (startup scale) 50 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 100,000 sessions of 3 min a month | 16th cheapest of 346 $215 a month | 239th of 346, with limits $234 a month | 6th cheapest of 346 $90 a month |
| Mass scraping & bots (undetectable) 1,000 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 3,000,000 sessions of 2 min a month | 147th of 338, with limits $4,292 a month | 154th of 338, with limits $4,750 a month | 71st of 338, with limits $1,800 a month |
| Parallel red teaming 200 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 5,000 sessions of 30 min a month Blaxel can limit outbound traffic to chosen domains, methods and paths on the provider side, which Morph does not document. | 3rd cheapest of 360 $217 a month | 214th of 360, with limits $228 a month | 2nd cheapest of 360 $200 a month |
| GPU eval jobs 10 at once · 8 vCPU / 32 GB · 500 sessions of 30 min a month | Can't run it | Can't run it | Can't run it |
| macOS agents 5 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 1,000 sessions of 20 min a month | Can't run it | Can't run it | Can't run it |
Key features
| Feature | Blaxel | Morph Cloud | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Isolation | Firecracker microVM with its own kernel | Full VM with its own kernel | Full VM with its own kernel, on dedicated AMD Ryzen 9 9950X hosts |
| Nested virtualization | No: Firecracker guests do not get /dev/kvm | Experimental | Yes: /dev/kvm, so Android emulators and VMs run inside |
| SSH and systemd | Root, terminal through the bl connect command, no native SSH | Root and systemd, SSH through Morph's gateway | Real SSH, root and systemd |
| Docker inside | Yes, with a Docker-in-sandbox image | Yes, including Docker in Docker and local Kubernetes | Yes |
| Disk | Files live in memory (about half the RAM); one block volume can be attached at creation | Disk counts toward the MCU price in 16 GiB steps; saved when you pause or snapshot, and a plain stop deletes the instance | A real disk, saved every minute and on every stop; a stopped sandbox is free |
| Sleep and wake | Standby on its own a few seconds after the last connection; wakes in under 25 ms with memory and processes | Pause with memory, billed only for the snapshot; wakes on the next HTTP request, SSH or exec call | Stop keeps the disk and costs nothing; resume boots the machine again |
| Fork a running machine | Fork with memory and running processes (private preview) | Branch with memory into as many copies as you ask for, in under 250 ms | Fork a running sandbox with its disk |
| Desktop and browser | Desktop and browser for computer use | Browser-based remote desktop; you install the browser and any computer use agent yourself | 60fps Linux desktop with Chromium and a computer use API, embeddable in your app |
| Coding agents | Claude Code image you drive from its terminal or your own harness | You install the agent, then drive it through a tmux API that sends keys and reads the screen | Claude Code, Codex and five more preinstalled, with a prompt, steer and events API |
| Keeping keys out of the sandbox | Proxy fills secrets into outbound HTTPS requests (public preview) | Responses Proxy for model APIs; other secrets are handed to the machine | Credentials proxy for model providers and any HTTPS API; a credential can switch to another account when credits run out |
| Inbound traffic | Preview URL per port, public or token-protected; no raw TCP or public IP | Named HTTP services with optional API key auth; no raw TCP | HTTPS URLs for up to 50 ports, token-protected by default; raw TCP |
| Outbound rules | Domain allow and deny lists, method and path rules, static egress IPs | No provider-side rules documented; filter inside the VM | Open internet; filter inside the VM with nftables |
| Guest systems | Linux | Linux, with experimental Windows and macOS (x86) | Linux |
| Regions | US (Oregon, North Virginia), London, Frankfurt | Not published | EU only: Germany, Finland, France, with EU data residency |
Every feature Battleships tracks (43)
| Feature | Blaxel | Morph Cloud | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full VM (own kernel) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Docker inside | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Nested virtualization | No | Yes | Yes |
| Root | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Systemd | No | Yes | Yes |
| Desktop GUI | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Browser | Yes | No | Yes |
| Computer-use API | Yes | No | Yes |
| SSH | No | Yes | Yes |
| Persistent disk | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Pause/resume | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Automatic snapshots | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Fork/clone | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Live fork (no pause) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Memory fork | Yes | Yes | No |
| Custom image (Docker or snapshot) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| ≥24 h sessions | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Idle auto-stop | Yes | Yes | No |
| Wake on request | Yes | Yes | No |
| HTTPS preview URLs | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Raw TCP inbound | No | No | Yes |
| Public IPv4 | No | No | No |
| Egress allowlist | Yes | No | No |
| Secret proxy | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Secret proxy for any API | Yes | No | Yes |
| Preinstalled agents | Yes | No | Yes |
| Agent harness API | No | Yes | Yes |
| MCP server | Yes | No | No |
| GPU | No | No | No |
| Windows | No | Yes | No |
| Arm64 | No | No | No |
| Self-hosting | No | No | No |
| BYOC | Yes | No | No |
| Open source | No | No | No |
| Scoped API keys | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Spend limits | No | Not published | Yes |
| Usage per sandbox (API) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Audit logs | Not published | Yes | No |
| SSO | Yes | Not published | No |
| SOC 2 | Yes | Not published | No |
| HIPAA | Yes | Not published | No |
| EU data residency | Yes | Not published | Yes |
| Zero data retention | Yes | Not published | Yes |
Performance
On the hpc-sandbox-benchmarks Node.js build-and-test loop at 4 vCPU and 8 GB, Blaxel did 19.48 runs per second and boat 26.69, so boat gets about 1.4 times the work done in the same time. Morph Cloud is not in that benchmark, so there is no comparable CPU number for it. Morph's under 250 ms snapshot restore measures start time, not CPU speed.
Node.js build-and-test loop at 4 vCPU / 8 GB, higher is better. Measured with the open hpc-sandbox-benchmarks suite. Blaxel measured on: Sandbox (active time, RAM-only pricing, CPU bundled). Morph Cloud has no published run in this suite yet, so there is no like-for-like number to compare.
Pricing in five scenarios
Each bill is priced from the providers' public price lists by the open Battleships engine, with the cheapest plan that runs the scenario.
| Scenario | Blaxel, a month | Morph Cloud, a month | boat, a month |
|---|---|---|---|
| One coding agent, workdays 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, 8 hours a day, 22 days a month, files kept between days | $33 · Pay-as-you-go Tier 1 | $32 · Developer | $20 · $20/mo |
| One agent that never stops 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, running 24/7 all month | $120 · Pay-as-you-go Tier 1 | $121 · Team | $26 · $20/mo |
| 50 agents in parallel 50 machines of 4 vCPU / 8 GB at once, 8-hour sessions, 1,100 sessions a month, Docker inside | $1,489 · Pay-as-you-go Tier 1 | $1,459 · Scale | $317 · $20/mo × 3 seats |
| Sandboxes for your users 2 vCPU / 4 GB, 30,000 sessions of 10 minutes a month, up to 300 at once | $396 · Pay-as-you-go Tier 2 · with limits | $325 · Scale | $200 · $100/mo × 2 seats |
| 1,000 short jobs at once 2 vCPU / 4 GB, 1,000 at once, 3 minutes each, 200,000 jobs a month | $876 · Pay-as-you-go Tier 2 · with limits | $869 · Scale | $2,000 · $2000/mo · with limits |
Blaxel: Blaxel charges for allocated RAM per second while a sandbox is active, meaning a connection is open, with CPU included (8 GB comes with 4 cores). In standby you pay only snapshot storage, and higher tiers unlock with $20 or $50 of top-ups a month that go into your wallet as credit.
Morph Cloud: Morph bills MCUs at $0.05 an hour, where a machine counts the largest of its vCPUs, its RAM in 4 GiB steps or its disk in 16 GiB steps. Team ($40 a month) and Scale ($250 a month) are prepaid MCU bundles at a discount, and a paused VM bills only its snapshot.
Morph Cloud: Plans start at $20 a month, and the whole fee is usage credit billed per second while a sandbox runs. A stopped sandbox costs nothing and keeps its disk.
Limits in those scenarios
Blaxel's self-serve tiers allow 10, 50 or 200 sandboxes at once, and sleeping ones count, so the 300-user and 1,000-job scenarios need a sales tier; Tiers 0 and 1 also delete sandboxes after 7 or 30 days. Morph limits whole-account resource pools instead: the Developer pool of 64 vCPU holds only 16 machines at 4 vCPU, while Scale fits both big scenarios. On Morph, more than 16 GiB of disk per vCPU raises the bill and egress prices are not published. boat has no session cap, but it limits how many machines start per minute, so 1,000 jobs at the same moment get queued.
| Scenario | Blaxel | Morph Cloud | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| One coding agent, workdays | None that bite |
| None that bite |
| One agent that never stops | None that bite |
| None that bite |
| 50 agents in parallel | None that bite |
| None that bite |
| Sandboxes for your users |
|
| None that bite |
| 1,000 short jobs at once |
|
|
|
Which one should you use?
Use Blaxel when
your sandboxes sit idle most of the time and must wake in milliseconds on their own, need domain-level outbound rules, or must run in the US.
- Sleeps on its own, wakes in milliseconds. Good for sandboxes that sit idle most of the time: one sleeps seconds after the last connection and wakes in under 25 ms.
- Network rules on the provider side. Good when an agent must only reach chosen domains: Blaxel filters by domain, method and path and can give static egress IPs.
- US and UK regions. Good for users in the US: Blaxel runs in Oregon and North Virginia as well as London and Frankfurt.
Use Morph Cloud when
your agents branch from one running state with its memory, need SSH and systemd on a full VM, or need experimental Windows and macOS guests.
- Branch a running machine with its memory. Good for agents that fan out from one running state: Morph copies a VM with its memory into many branches in under 250 ms.
- A full VM with SSH and systemd. Good for tools that expect a normal machine: Morph gives SSH, systemd, Docker in Docker and local Kubernetes.
- More than Linux, plus managed CI. Good for teams that also need experimental Windows or macOS guests, managed GitHub Actions runners or a shared filesystem.
Where boat fits
Blaxel and Morph Cloud are both built around machines that sleep and wake with their memory. If your agents instead work for hours on builds, tests, Docker and emulators, boat gives each one a whole Linux machine with a disk that is saved every minute, agents already inside, and a faster CPU than Blaxel's: 26.69 runs per second against 19.48.
Emulators and VMs start
An Android emulator or a VM needs /dev/kvm. Blaxel's Firecracker guests do not get it, so they never start, and on Morph nested virtualization is experimental. boat exposes /dev/kvm in every sandbox.
Agents you drive from outside
On Blaxel you drive a Claude Code image from its terminal or your own harness, and on Morph you send keystrokes through tmux and parse the screen. boat ships seven agents with one API to prompt, steer and read events.
Work is saved without asking
Blaxel keeps files in memory, about half the RAM, unless you attach a volume at creation. Morph saves only when you pause or snapshot, and a plain stop deletes the instance. boat saves the disk every minute, and stops are free.
Use boat when your agents do real work for hours: builds, tests, Docker and emulators on a whole Linux machine with a disk saved every minute, agents built in and hosting on many ports in the EU. Compare it one to one: boat vs Blaxel and boat vs Morph Cloud.
Questions people ask
Is Blaxel cheaper than Morph Cloud?
They are close. One agent that never stops costs $120 a month on Blaxel and $121 on Morph, and 50 agents in parallel cost $1,489 on Blaxel against $1,459 on Morph. For 300 users or 1,000 jobs at once, Morph's Scale plan fits while Blaxel's self-serve tiers stop at 200; boat runs 50 agents for $317 a month.
Which is faster, Blaxel or Morph Cloud?
Only Blaxel has a CPU measurement: 19.48 runs per second on a Node.js build-and-test loop at 4 vCPU and 8 GB, against 26.69 for boat. Morph is not in that benchmark. Morph restores a snapshot in under 250 ms and Blaxel wakes from standby in under 25 ms, but those are start times, not CPU speed.
Can Blaxel and Morph Cloud run Docker?
Yes. Blaxel runs Docker with its Docker-in-sandbox image, and Morph runs Docker in Docker and local Kubernetes. An Android emulator is different: it needs /dev/kvm, which Blaxel does not give, Morph lists as experimental, and boat exposes in every sandbox.
Is Blaxel a microVM and Morph Cloud a full VM?
Yes. Each Blaxel sandbox is a Firecracker microVM with its own kernel, and its files live in memory unless you attach a volume. Each Morph instance is a full VM with SSH and systemd. boat is also a full VM, with /dev/kvm and a real disk.
Do Blaxel and Morph Cloud keep memory when a sandbox sleeps?
Both do. Blaxel goes to standby on its own seconds after the last connection and wakes in under 25 ms, and Morph pauses with its memory and wakes on the next HTTP request, SSH or exec call. boat keeps the disk on stop and boots again on resume, so running processes do not survive.
Where do Blaxel and Morph Cloud run?
Blaxel runs in Oregon, North Virginia, London and Frankfurt. Morph does not publish its regions. boat runs only in the EU, in Germany, Finland and France.
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