boat vs Clever Cloud
Clever Cloud is a platform for hosting apps: you push code or a Docker image, and it runs on fresh, read-only VMs that it rebuilds on every deploy. boat gives each agent its own VM it can change, with root, Docker, /dev/kvm, a disk that keeps its files and coding agents built in.
Where boat stands out
A machine the agent can change
On boat the agent has root, systemd, Docker and /dev/kvm, so it can install packages, start services and run emulators. On Clever Cloud you log in as a non-root user on a read-only instance, and only one container runs per app unless you open the Docker socket.
Files that stay, and forks
A boat sandbox keeps its disk, takes snapshots every minute and on stop, and costs nothing while stopped. You can fork a running sandbox to try two paths at once. Clever Cloud rebuilds the VM on every restart, so the agent's work is lost unless it was written to an add-on.
Agents, desktop and keys built in
boat ships Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and other agents inside each VM, which you drive from outside with a prompt, steer and events API. Every VM also has a 60fps desktop with Chromium, and the credentials proxy keeps real API keys out of the machine.
The companies and products
boat
boat.dev runs sandboxes for AI agents: each one is a full Linux VM with its own kernel.
You start a machine with one command or one API call, then SSH in, run Docker, open a desktop, or let a built-in agent (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and others) work in it. The disk stays between sessions, and a stopped sandbox costs nothing.
- Isolation
- Full VM per sandbox, own kernel
- Regions
- EU: Germany, Finland, France
Clever Cloud
Clever Cloud is a European platform as a service (PaaS) based in Nantes, France: it hosts web apps, workers and databases for development teams.
You deploy code in one of many runtimes, or a Docker image, and Clever Cloud runs it on instances called scalers, each in its own virtual machine, with autoscaling, managed add-ons and HTTPS routing. Instances are read-only: every deploy or restart builds a fresh VM, and anything that must last goes into an add-on such as a database, an FS Bucket or Cellar object storage. It is a different kind of product from an agent sandbox, so this page compares the parts where the two overlap.
- Kind of product
- Platform as a service for hosting apps, not an agent sandbox
- Isolation
- Each application instance runs in its own virtual machine; Docker containers run inside VMs
- Regions
- Paris, Roubaix, Gravelines, London, Warsaw, Montreal, Singapore and Sydney, plus HDS zones in France
- On your own servers
- Clever Cloud On Premises, on request since 2016
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. “3rd cheapest of 367” means 2 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 | boat: price rank | Clever Cloud: price rank |
|---|---|---|
| Software factory 100 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 2,200 sessions of 8 h a month Clever Cloud is a compromise here: an agent's installs and edits vanish when the instance restarts, and it logs in as a non-root user, while boat keeps the disk and gives root. | 3rd cheapest of 367 $634 a month | 239th of 367, with limits $3,233 a month |
| Always-on AI employees 50 machines 24/7 · 2 vCPU / 4 GB An assistant that runs for weeks needs files that last; on Clever Cloud they must live in a database or storage add-on, while boat keeps them on the VM's disk. | 5th cheapest of 366 $657 a month | 246th of 366, with limits $3,352 a month |
| Code interpreter bursts 100 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 200,000 sessions of 1 min a month Clever Tasks fit short jobs well: Clever Cloud starts a VM, runs the command, stops the VM and bills by the second, with no plan fee. | 186th of 345, with limits $2,000 a month | 88th of 345, with limits $129 a month |
| Sandboxes for your users 300 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 30,000 sessions of 23 min a month Each user sandbox on Clever Cloud is a separate app built from a deploy, with no fork or snapshot, so creating hundreds on demand is slow work; boat creates and forks VMs by API. | Cheapest of 361 $209 a month | 249th of 361, with limits $1,068 a month |
| RL rollouts 1,000 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 1,000,000 sessions of 3 min a month | 34th of 360, with limits $2,000 a month | 83rd of 360, with limits $4,592 a month |
| Agent evals 250 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 15,000 sessions of 20 min a month | 10th cheapest of 364 $200 a month | 147th of 364, with limits $918 a month |
| CI runners 40 at once · 8 vCPU / 16 GB · 6,000 sessions of 12 min a month Both bill by the second; boat's CI jobs get root, /dev/kvm and a persistent cache disk, while a Clever Cloud task starts from a fresh build each time. | 4th cheapest of 377 $86 a month | 160th of 377, with limits $441 a month |
| 24/7 dev boxes 1 machine 24/7 · 4 vCPU / 8 GB | 18th cheapest of 368 $26 a month | 124th of 368, with limits $134 a month |
| Computer-use agents 50 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 20,000 sessions of 15 min a month Clever Cloud has no desktop, browser or computer-use tooling; boat streams a 60fps desktop with Chromium on every VM. | 6th cheapest of 369 $200 a month | 232nd of 369, with limits $918 a month |
| Browser-use agents 50 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 30,000 sessions of 10 min a month On Clever Cloud you would package your own headless browser in a Docker image; boat ships Chromium and browser control on every VM. | 7th cheapest of 367 $200 a month | 254th of 367, with limits $459 a month |
| Scraping & bots (startup scale) 50 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 100,000 sessions of 3 min a month | 6th cheapest of 346 $90 a month | 221st of 346, with limits $193 a month |
| Mass scraping & bots (undetectable) 1,000 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 3,000,000 sessions of 2 min a month | 71st of 338, with limits $1,800 a month | 132nd of 338, with limits $3,867 a month |
| Parallel red teaming 200 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 5,000 sessions of 30 min a month | 2nd cheapest of 360 $200 a month | 215th of 360, with limits $230 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 |
| 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 |
Key features
| Feature | boat | Clever Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| Kind of product | Agent sandbox: a VM per agent, created and controlled by API | App hosting platform: deploy code or a Docker image, scale it, add managed databases |
| Isolation | Every sandbox is a full VM with its own kernel | Every app instance runs in its own VM; Docker containers run inside it |
| Root and system access | Root, systemd and /dev/kvm on every machine | SSH in as a non-root user on a read-only instance; no nested virtualization documented |
| Docker inside | Docker and Docker Compose run inside the VM like on any Linux server | Your image runs as one container; the Docker socket is opt-in (CC_MOUNT_DOCKER_SOCKET) and Docker Compose is not supported |
| Files after a restart | The disk persists, with snapshots every minute and on stop; a stopped sandbox costs nothing | Changes on an instance are lost on redeploy or restart; data goes in add-ons (FS Buckets are not available to Docker apps) |
| Fork and snapshots | Fork a running sandbox; named snapshots as templates | No instance snapshot or fork; new instances always start from a build |
| Reaching the machine | HTTPS URLs for up to 50 ports, token-protected; raw TCP; dedicated IPv6 or IPv4 | HTTPS on one port (8080) with custom domains; one TCP port, mapped to a random public port above 5000 |
| Run-to-completion jobs | Start a VM, run the job, stop it; starts per minute are capped by plan | Clever Tasks start a VM, run one command and stop the VM, billed by the second |
| Managed databases and add-ons | None; you run databases yourself inside the VM | Managed databases, object storage, FS Buckets and more, linked to apps by environment variables |
| Desktop and computer use | 60fps desktop and Chromium, computer use and browser control, embeddable stream | None |
| Coding agents | Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and more preinstalled, with a prompt, steer and events API | None inside apps; an MCP server and CLI let agents manage the platform from outside |
| Keeping keys out of the machine | AI credentials proxy for model providers and any HTTPS API you register; switch a credential to another account when credits run out | Credentials are injected as environment variables into the instance |
| Regions | EU only: Germany, Finland, France | France, London and Warsaw, plus Montreal, Singapore and Sydney |
| On your own servers | No | Clever Cloud On Premises, on request |
| Compliance and transparency | SOC 2 is in progress. We're open about where we stand: live status and data retention policy. | No SOC 2 report published |
Every feature Battleships tracks (43)
| Feature | boat | Clever Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| Full VM (own kernel) | Yes | Yes |
| Docker inside | Yes | Yes |
| Nested virtualization | Yes | No |
| Root | Yes | Not published |
| Systemd | Yes | Not published |
| Desktop GUI | Yes | No |
| Browser | Yes | No |
| Computer-use API | Yes | No |
| SSH | Yes | Yes |
| Persistent disk | Yes | No |
| Pause/resume | Yes | Yes |
| Automatic snapshots | Yes | No |
| Fork/clone | Yes | No |
| Live fork (no pause) | Yes | No |
| Memory fork | No | No |
| Custom image (Docker or snapshot) | Yes | Yes |
| ≥24 h sessions | Yes | Yes |
| Idle auto-stop | No | No |
| Wake on request | No | No |
| HTTPS preview URLs | Yes | Yes |
| Raw TCP inbound | Yes | Yes |
| Public IPv4 | No | No |
| Egress allowlist | No | No |
| Secret proxy | Yes | No |
| Secret proxy for any API | Yes | No |
| Preinstalled agents | Yes | No |
| Agent harness API | Yes | No |
| MCP server | No | Yes |
| GPU | No | No |
| Windows | No | No |
| Arm64 | No | No |
| Self-hosting | No | Yes |
| BYOC | No | No |
| Open source | No | No |
| Scoped API keys | Yes | Not published |
| Spend limits | Yes | Not published |
| Usage per sandbox (API) | Yes | No |
| Audit logs | No | Not published |
| SSO | No | No |
| SOC 2 | No | No |
| HIPAA | No | No |
| EU data residency | Yes | Yes |
| Zero data retention | Yes | Not published |
Performance
There is no comparable measurement for Clever Cloud: it was not part of the public StarSling benchmark run. boat did 26.69 Node.js build-and-test runs per second at 4 vCPU / 8 GB on dedicated AMD Ryzen 9 9950X (Zen 5) hosts. Clever Cloud notes that its smallest nano and pico instances run with reduced CPU priority.
Node.js build-and-test loop at 4 vCPU / 8 GB, higher is better. Measured with the open hpc-sandbox-benchmarks suite. Clever 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 | boat, a month | Clever Cloud, 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 | $20 · $20/mo | $32 · Pay as you go · with limits |
| One agent that never stops 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, running 24/7 all month | $26 · $20/mo | $134 · Pay as you go · with limits |
| 50 agents in parallel 50 machines of 4 vCPU / 8 GB at once, 8-hour sessions, 1,100 sessions a month, Docker inside | $317 · $20/mo × 3 seats | $1,616 · Pay as you go · with limits |
| Sandboxes for your users 2 vCPU / 4 GB, 30,000 sessions of 10 minutes a month, up to 300 at once | $200 · $100/mo × 2 seats | $459 · Pay as you go · with limits |
| 1,000 short jobs at once 2 vCPU / 4 GB, 1,000 at once, 3 minutes each, 200,000 jobs a month | $2,000 · $2000/mo · with limits | $918 · Pay as you go · with limits |
boat: You pick a monthly plan from $20, and all of it becomes usage credit spent per second on running sandboxes. A stopped sandbox costs nothing and keeps its disk.
Clever Cloud: Clever Cloud bills each instance by the second of running, at a fixed price per size from nano to 3XL; the sizes priced here are L (6 vCPU / 8 GiB) and M (4 vCPU / 4 GiB), because no size matches 4 vCPU / 8 GiB. Disk and egress prices are not published per instance, and Premium adds a 490 euro monthly licence with consumption billed at 1.8 times and a 12-month commitment.
Limits in those scenarios
None of the Clever Cloud scenarios fully fit, mainly because it is an app platform: an instance has no disk that survives a restart, so the coding-agent scenarios lose their work. For 300 user sandboxes and 1,000 short jobs at once, Clever Cloud does not publish how many instances can run at the same time, and the typical published limit is 50. On boat the 1,000-job burst is limited by starts: the $2,000 plan allows 90 starts a minute and 2,400 a day, so a big burst gets queued.
| Scenario | boat | Clever Cloud |
|---|---|---|
| One coding agent, workdays | None that bite |
|
| One agent that never stops | None that bite |
|
| 50 agents in parallel | None that bite |
|
| Sandboxes for your users | None that bite |
|
| 1,000 short jobs at once |
|
|
Which one should you use?
Use Clever Cloud when
you need to host a finished web app in production with managed databases and autoscaling, need regions outside the EU, or must run the platform on your own servers.
- Hosting the app your agent built. Useful once the app is done: Clever Cloud runs it in production with autoscaling, managed databases and custom domains.
- Regions outside the EU and your own servers. Useful if you serve users in Canada, Singapore or Australia, or must run the platform in your own data center.
- Short jobs with no plan fee. Useful for bursts of short scripts: Clever Tasks start a VM, run one command, stop, and bill by the second.
Use boat when
agents need a real machine to work in: root, Docker, a disk that keeps their work, forks, a desktop and coding agents you drive from outside.
- A machine the agent can change. Coding agents install tools, edit system files and start services as they go. On Clever Cloud each of those must be baked into the image and redeployed first, which turns one agent step into a build.
- Files that stay, and forks. An agent that restarts loses its checkout, its installs and its half-done work on Clever Cloud. The workaround is a database or object storage add-on, which the agent's tools do not write to by default.
- Agents, desktop and keys built in. Clever Cloud says its AI tooling is not an AI-specific product, and it injects secrets as environment variables. You would build the agent runner, the browser and the key handling yourself.
Questions people ask
Can I use Clever Cloud as a sandbox for AI agents?
Partly. You can deploy a Docker image and SSH in, but instances are read-only, you log in as a non-root user and changes are lost when the instance restarts. Clever Cloud is built to host apps, so an agent that installs things and keeps files fits a sandbox like boat better.
Is boat cheaper than Clever Cloud?
In most of the scenarios we priced, yes: one coding agent on workdays comes to $20 a month on boat and $32 on Clever Cloud, and one agent running all month comes to $26 versus $134. 50 agents in parallel come to $317 versus $1,616. For 1,000 short jobs at once, Clever Cloud comes to $918 against $2,000 on boat, and neither fits as priced.
Do Clever Cloud apps run in VMs or containers?
In VMs. Clever Cloud runs each application instance in its own virtual machine, and Docker images run as a container inside that VM. boat also gives every sandbox its own VM, with root and a disk that persists.
Does data stay in the EU on both?
boat runs only in the EU (Germany, Finland and France), with EU data residency and a zero data retention option. Clever Cloud has European zones in France, Warsaw and London, and also runs in Montreal, Singapore and Sydney, so you pick the zone when you create an app.
Is boat SOC 2 compliant?
SOC 2 is in progress. We're open about where we stand: live status at status.ascii.dev and our data retention policy at docs.boat.dev/data-retention. Clever Cloud lists ISO 27001 and HDS on its security page.
Start a sandbox
Install the CLI, then run boat new.
7-day free trial