boat vs Northflank
Both give each agent a Linux machine with its own kernel. boat keeps the whole machine between runs and ships the agent, desktop and browser inside it, while Northflank is a broad cloud platform with GPUs, many regions and your own cloud.
Where boat stands out
The whole machine comes back
boat saves a sandbox's whole disk every minute and when it stops, and a stopped sandbox costs nothing. Start it again and every package, file and config the agent left is still there. You can also fork a running sandbox into a copy with the same disk.
Agents you drive from outside
Claude Code, Codex and five other agents come preinstalled in every boat sandbox. You send a prompt, steer the agent mid-task and follow its events through one API, and real API keys stay outside the machine in a credentials proxy.
A desktop and a browser inside
Every boat sandbox can show a 60fps Linux desktop with Chromium, ready for computer-use agents, and you can embed the stream in your app. It also has /dev/kvm, so Android emulators and VMs run inside.
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
Northflank
Northflank is a London developer platform for running services, jobs and databases on Kubernetes, and Sandboxes is its product for running untrusted code.
A Northflank sandbox is a container image deployed as a service: CPU sandboxes run in Kata microVMs with their own kernel, and GPU sandboxes run under gVisor. You create and drive them from the JavaScript or Python SDK, the CLI or the dashboard, on Northflank's cloud or inside your own. It suits teams that already want one platform for apps, databases, GPUs and sandboxes.
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 | Northflank: price rank |
|---|---|---|
| Software factory 100 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 2,200 sessions of 8 h a month A coding agent installs packages all over the machine; on Northflank only attached volumes survive a pause, while boat keeps the whole disk. | 3rd cheapest of 367 $634 a month | 159th of 367, with limits $1,477 a month |
| Always-on AI employees 50 machines 24/7 · 2 vCPU / 4 GB An assistant that lives on its machine for weeks needs its tools and files to stay put across stops, which boat does by default. | 5th cheapest of 366 $657 a month | 173rd of 366, with limits $1,365 a month |
| Code interpreter bursts 100 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 200,000 sessions of 1 min a month Short code runs on small machines are where Northflank's per-second plans from a tenth of a vCPU fit well. | 186th of 345, with limits $2,000 a month | 84th of 345, with limits $115 a month |
| Sandboxes for your users 300 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 30,000 sessions of 23 min a month Both can give each user a machine; boat adds HTTPS on up to 50 ports and a whole disk that survives, Northflank adds regions around the world. | Cheapest of 361 $209 a month | 89th of 361, with limits $815 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 | 342nd of 360, with limits $1,762 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 | 134th of 364, with limits $689 a month |
| CI runners 40 at once · 8 vCPU / 16 GB · 6,000 sessions of 12 min a month Both fit; boat adds /dev/kvm for Android emulators and VM builds, and its stops are free. | 4th cheapest of 377 $86 a month | 38th cheapest of 377 $352 a month |
| 24/7 dev boxes 1 machine 24/7 · 4 vCPU / 8 GB | 18th cheapest of 368 $26 a month | 151st of 368, with limits $59 a month |
| Computer-use agents 50 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 20,000 sessions of 15 min a month boat ships a 60fps Linux desktop and Chromium for computer use; on Northflank you would build and stream a desktop yourself. | 6th cheapest of 369 $200 a month | 151st of 369, with limits $371 a month |
| Browser-use agents 50 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 30,000 sessions of 10 min a month boat has Chromium ready inside every sandbox; Northflank has no browser product, so you install and run one in your image. | 7th cheapest of 367 $200 a month | 200th of 367, with limits $194 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 | 196th of 346, with limits $117 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 | 83rd of 338, with limits $2,049 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 | 141st of 360, with limits $99 a month |
| GPU eval jobs 10 at once · 8 vCPU / 32 GB · 500 sessions of 30 min a month Northflank has GPU sandboxes from L4 to H100 and up; boat is CPU only. | Can't run it | 4th cheapest of 98 $693 a month |
| 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
Every feature Battleships tracks (43)
| Feature | boat | Northflank |
|---|---|---|
| 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 | Yes |
| Pause/resume | Yes | Yes |
| Automatic snapshots | Yes | Yes |
| Fork/clone | Yes | Yes |
| Live fork (no pause) | Yes | Yes |
| 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 | Yes |
| Secret proxy | Yes | Yes |
| Secret proxy for any API | Yes | Yes |
| Preinstalled agents | Yes | Yes |
| Agent harness API | Yes | No |
| MCP server | No | No |
| GPU | No | Yes |
| Windows | No | No |
| Arm64 | No | Yes |
| Self-hosting | No | Yes |
| BYOC | No | Yes |
| Open source | No | No |
| Scoped API keys | Yes | Not published |
| Spend limits | Yes | Not published |
| Usage per sandbox (API) | Yes | Yes |
| Audit logs | No | Yes |
| SSO | No | Yes |
| SOC 2 | No | Yes |
| HIPAA | No | Yes |
| EU data residency | Yes | Yes |
| Zero data retention | Yes | Not published |
Performance
There is no comparable CPU measurement for Northflank Sandboxes: it has no result on the hpc-sandbox-benchmarks test boat is measured on. boat did 26.69 runs per second on that Node.js build-and-test loop at 4 vCPU / 8 GB, on dedicated AMD Ryzen 9 9950X hosts.
Node.js build-and-test loop at 4 vCPU / 8 GB, higher is better. Measured with the open hpc-sandbox-benchmarks suite. Northflank 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 | Northflank, 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 · Developer Sandbox (free tier) · with limits |
| One agent that never stops 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, running 24/7 all month | $26 · $20/mo | $108 · Developer Sandbox (free tier) · 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 | $1,322 · Developer Sandbox (free tier) · 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 | $361 · Developer Sandbox (free tier) · 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 | $688 · Developer Sandbox (free tier) · with limits |
boat: Plans start at $20 a month, and the whole fee is usage credit. You pay per second while a sandbox runs, and a stopped sandbox costs nothing and keeps its whole disk.
Northflank: Northflank bills per second for the plan size you pick, with no monthly fee, until you pause the sandbox; there is no idle auto-pause. Volumes cost $0.15 per GB a month even while paused, and outbound traffic costs $0.06 per GB.
Limits in those scenarios
In the first four scenarios the limit that bites on Northflank is what survives a stop: only attached volumes keep their files, so packages installed anywhere else reset. Northflank also does not publish how many sandboxes can run at once, so 300 or 1,000 at a time is not confirmed. boat's limit is in the burst scenario: even the $2,000 plan queues starts above 90 a minute, so 1,000 short jobs at once do not all start together.
| Scenario | boat | Northflank |
|---|---|---|
| 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 Northflank when
you need GPUs next to the agent, regions outside Europe, or sandboxes inside your own cloud account next to the rest of your apps.
- GPU sandboxes. For agents that train, fine-tune or run models: Northflank has GPU sandboxes from L4 to H100 and up.
- Regions around the world. For users far from Europe: Northflank runs in the US, Asia, Australia, South America and Africa too.
- Your own cloud, and one platform. For teams that must run in their own AWS, GCP or Azure account, or want apps and sandboxes on one platform.
Use boat when
your agents work on one machine for hours or days and should find it as they left it: installs, Docker, emulators, a desktop and a browser, with the agent itself driven from your code.
- The whole machine comes back. On Northflank a pause wipes everything outside attached volumes, so an agent reinstalls its tools each time unless you plan volumes or snapshots for every path it touches.
- Agents you drive from outside. Northflank Harnesses start the agent for you, but you reach it through a terminal or SSH, so running many agents from your own code means building that control layer yourself.
- A desktop and a browser inside. Northflank sandboxes are headless, so a computer-use or browser agent needs you to build an image with a desktop, a browser and a way to stream it.
Questions people ask
Is boat cheaper than Northflank?
In four of the five scenarios on this page, yes: one agent that never stops is $26 a month on boat against $108 on Northflank. For 1,000 short jobs at once, Northflank's small per-second plans cost less, and boat's plans queue the starts.
Does a Northflank sandbox keep its files when paused?
Only files on attached volumes. Pausing scales the sandbox to zero, and the rest of its disk and all running processes are lost. boat keeps the whole disk on every stop.
Can I run Claude Code or Codex in each?
Yes. Northflank Harnesses start Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode or Pi, and you connect through a browser terminal or SSH. boat preinstalls seven agents and adds an API to prompt, steer and follow them from your code.
Does Northflank have GPUs?
Yes, GPU sandboxes run under gVisor with cards from L4 to H100 and more. boat runs on CPUs only.
Can I run Docker and Android emulators in each?
Both give each sandbox its own kernel, so Docker can run inside. boat also exposes /dev/kvm for Android emulators and VMs; Northflank does not document that inside a sandbox.
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.
Start a sandbox
Install the CLI, then run boat new.
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