Claude Managed Agents vs Instabox
Claude Managed Agents is Anthropic's hosted agent: you send a task, and Claude works in a small container that Anthropic runs. Instabox, an invite-only beta that launched on 2026-10-14, gives each agent its own Linux virtual machine with root and Docker, and you bring and run the agent yourself.
The companies and products
Claude Managed Agents
Claude Managed Agents is Anthropic's ready-made agent harness: Claude runs as an autonomous agent in a cloud sandbox that Anthropic manages, and you talk to it through an events API.
This is an agent platform, not a sandbox you rent. You define an agent (model, prompt, tools, MCP servers, skills) and an environment, then start sessions, send messages as events and stream back what Claude does; the harness handles tool calls, prompt caching and compaction. Each session gets its own Ubuntu container, or runs its tools on a worker you host yourself. It is built for teams that want Claude doing long tasks without building their own agent loop or sandbox.
Instabox
Instabox, made by InsForge, gives each AI agent its own Linux computer in the cloud. It launched on 2026-10-14 as an invite-only beta.
Each Instabox machine is a Firecracker microVM with its own kernel, root and Docker, started from one of four templates (agent-browser, universal, herdr or orca) or from your own snapshot. Every machine is 4 vCPU / 8 GiB with 20 GB of storage, and you drive it from a CLI, a TypeScript SDK or an HTTP API, with SSH, mosh, public port URLs and a desktop for computer use. It is aimed at developers who want a cloud box for a coding agent.
- Isolation
- Firecracker microVM per machine
- Machines per account
- 5, in any state: paused and stopped ones count
- Company
- InsForge AI, Inc.
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. “106th cheapest of 367” means 105 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 | Claude Managed Agents: price rank | Instabox: price rank | boat: price rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software factory 100 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 2,200 sessions of 8 h a month A coding agent on Managed Agents works in a container with up to 8 GB of memory and Docker only in limited availability; Instabox gives it a 4 vCPU / 8 GiB VM with Docker, and boat goes up to 16 vCPU / 32 GB. | 106th of 367, with limits $964 a month | No published price | 3rd cheapest of 367 $634 a month |
| Always-on AI employees 50 machines 24/7 · 2 vCPU / 4 GB Managed Agents sessions sleep for free between messages but keep sandbox files only 30 days; Instabox pauses a machine after 30 idle minutes unless you turn that off; a boat disk stays as long as you keep the sandbox. | 219th of 366, with limits $2,511 a month | No published price | 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 | 163rd of 345, with limits $756 a month | No published price | 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 Instabox allows 5 machines per account, paused and stopped ones included, and Managed Agents sandboxes have no inbound ports, so neither can yet give many users a sandbox they can open; boat gives each one HTTPS URLs. | 231st of 361, with limits $823 a month | No published price | 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 | 252nd of 360, with limits $3,978 a month | No published price | 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 Instabox's 5-machine cap limits how many evals run at once; Managed Agents publishes no session cap, only 300 creates per minute and spend limits per usage tier. | 244th of 364, with limits $320 a month | No published price | 10th cheapest of 364 $200 a month |
| CI runners 40 at once · 8 vCPU / 16 GB · 6,000 sessions of 12 min a month CI jobs that build Android apps or VM images need /dev/kvm, which boat exposes and neither Managed Agents nor Instabox documents. | 227th of 377, with limits $96 a month | No published price | 4th cheapest of 377 $86 a month |
| 24/7 dev boxes 1 machine 24/7 · 4 vCPU / 8 GB Managed Agents has no SSH and is reached only through the session API; Instabox has SSH with mosh, and boat adds SSH with published plans. | 224th of 368, with limits $48 a month | No published price | 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 Managed Agents has headless Chromium with Playwright but no desktop; Instabox has a Linux desktop with a screenshot and click API where you bring the model; boat streams a desktop at 60fps with a computer-use agent. | 127th of 369, with limits $288 a month | No published price | 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 | 126th of 367, with limits $288 a month | No published price | 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 | 127th of 346, with limits $390 a month | No published price | 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 | 155th of 338, with limits $4,798 a month | No published price | 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 | 179th of 360, with limits $160 a month | No published price | 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 | No published price | 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 | No published price | Can't run it |
Key features
| Feature | Claude Managed Agents | Instabox | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | A hosted Claude agent: Anthropic's harness runs Claude in a sandbox and you send it events | A Linux machine per agent, driven from a CLI, a TypeScript SDK or an HTTP API; invite-only beta | A sandbox platform: each agent gets its own full Linux machine, with coding agents built in |
| Isolation | Isolated Linux container per session | Firecracker microVM with its own kernel and root | Full VM with its own kernel on dedicated AMD Ryzen 9 9950X hosts |
| Machine size | Up to 8 GB memory and 10 GB disk; vCPU not published; not configurable | One size for everyone: 4 vCPU / 8 GiB with 20 GB storage; other sizes are refused | Several sizes, up to 8 vCPU / 16 GB on the $20 plan and 16 vCPU / 32 GB on $100 and above |
| Docker and root | Docker listed as limited availability; root and systemd not documented | Docker and Docker Compose run inside, with root | Root, Docker, Compose and systemd |
| Nested virtualization | Not documented | Not documented | Yes, /dev/kvm for Android emulators and VMs |
| What persists | Sandbox is checkpointed when a session goes idle; state is kept only 30 days after the sandbox is created | Machine files are kept; snapshots are saved by hand, up to 10, and saving stops a running machine unless the server allows a live save | The whole disk, saved every minute and on stop, for as long as you keep the sandbox |
| Fork | No fork or clone of a session or sandbox | Fork copies a stopped machine only | Fork a running sandbox with its disk |
| Idle and wake | An idle session resumes from its checkpoint on the next message, and idle time is not billed | Pause keeps memory and running programs; resume usually takes about a second; pauses after 30 idle minutes by default | Stop keeps the disk; start boots the machine again by API |
| Inbound access | No inbound ports or SSH; reached only through the sessions and events API | HTTPS on up to 16 ports, open to anyone with the URL and offline while paused; SSH gateway with mosh | HTTPS URLs for up to 50 ports, token-protected by default; raw TCP; SSH |
| Browser and desktop | Headless Chromium with Playwright; no desktop or computer-use tool | Linux desktop with a browser on one template, screenshot and click API, shareable view or control links; you bring the model | Linux desktop streamed at 60fps, with Chromium and a computer-use agent |
| Agents | Anthropic's harness with Claude models, steering, multiagent threads, memory stores and webhooks | Templates and saved agent sign-ins in snapshots; you run the agent yourself | Claude Code, Codex and five more preinstalled, driven from outside with a prompt, steer and events API |
| Keeping API keys out of the sandbox | Vault secrets live in the sandbox as placeholders and are swapped in at egress, per host | Vault writes your secrets into each machine as environment variables or files | Credentials proxy: real keys never enter the sandbox, for model providers and any HTTPS API |
| Outbound rules and self-hosting | Open, or limited to listed hosts; tools can also run on workers you host | Not documented | Open internet, no provider-side allowlist; no self-hosting |
| Where data lives | US workspace geo only | Not published | EU only (Germany, Finland, France) |
Every feature Battleships tracks (43)
| Feature | Claude Managed Agents | Instabox | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full VM (own kernel) | No | Yes | Yes |
| Docker inside | Not published | Yes | Yes |
| Nested virtualization | No | Not published | Yes |
| Root | Not published | Yes | Yes |
| Systemd | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Desktop GUI | No | Yes | Yes |
| Browser | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Computer-use API | No | Yes | Yes |
| SSH | No | Yes | Yes |
| Persistent disk | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Pause/resume | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Automatic snapshots | Yes | No | Yes |
| Fork/clone | No | Yes | Yes |
| Live fork (no pause) | No | No | Yes |
| Memory fork | No | No | 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 | No | No |
| HTTPS preview URLs | No | Yes | Yes |
| Raw TCP inbound | No | Not published | Yes |
| Public IPv4 | No | No | No |
| Egress allowlist | Yes | Not published | No |
| Secret proxy | Yes | No | Yes |
| Secret proxy for any API | Yes | No | Yes |
| Preinstalled agents | Yes | Not published | Yes |
| Agent harness API | Yes | Not published | Yes |
| MCP server | Yes | Not published | No |
| GPU | No | No | No |
| Windows | No | No | No |
| Arm64 | No | Not published | No |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Not published | No |
| BYOC | Yes | Not published | No |
| Open source | No | No | No |
| Scoped API keys | Not published | Yes | Yes |
| Spend limits | Yes | Not published | Yes |
| Usage per sandbox (API) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Audit logs | Not published | Not published | No |
| SSO | Yes | No | No |
| SOC 2 | Yes | Not published | No |
| HIPAA | No | Not published | No |
| EU data residency | No | Not published | Yes |
| Zero data retention | No | Not published | Yes |
Performance
There is no comparable measurement for either one: neither Managed Agents nor Instabox was part of the hpc-sandbox-benchmarks run, and Anthropic does not publish how many vCPUs a sandbox gets. boat did 26.69 runs per second on the Node.js build-and-test loop at 4 vCPU / 8 GB. Instabox says a new machine's shell is ready in under a second; that has not been measured here.
Node.js build-and-test loop at 4 vCPU / 8 GB, higher is better. Measured with the open hpc-sandbox-benchmarks suite. Claude Managed Agents and Instabox have 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 | Claude Managed Agents, a month | Instabox, 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 | $13 · Claude API (pay-as-you-go, usage tiers) · with limits | No published price | $20 · $20/mo |
| One agent that never stops 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, running 24/7 all month | $53 · Claude API (pay-as-you-go, usage tiers) · with limits | No published price | $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 | $634 · Claude API (pay-as-you-go, usage tiers) · with limits | No published price | $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 | $360 · Claude API (pay-as-you-go, usage tiers) · with limits | No published price | $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 | $796 · Claude API (pay-as-you-go, usage tiers) · with limits | No published price | $2,000 · $2000/mo · with limits |
Claude Managed Agents: Managed Agents bills model tokens at API rates plus a flat session runtime fee, measured only while the session is running, including time spent waiting on the model. Tokens usually cost more than the runtime.
Instabox: Instabox is free during the beta, with 5 machines per user, and its pricing page says "Free until we figure it out". It publishes no price, so no bill can be compared yet.
Instabox: 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 disk.
Limits in those scenarios
A Managed Agents sandbox has up to 8 GB of memory and 10 GB of disk, an unpublished vCPU count and Docker only in limited availability, so no scenario on this page counts as a clean fit; Anthropic publishes no session cap, only 300 creates per minute and spend limits per usage tier. Instabox allows 5 machines per account, paused and stopped ones included, all at 4 vCPU / 8 GiB, and an API exec call runs at most 10 minutes with 4 at once; with no published rate it cannot be priced in any scenario. boat fits four of the five, but at 1,000 short jobs at once the $2,000 plan queues starts above 90 per minute and allows 2,400 starts a day.
| Scenario | Claude Managed Agents | Instabox | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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 Claude Managed Agents when
you want Claude itself to do long text and code tasks with no harness to build, idle time that costs nothing, and the option to run tools on your own workers.
- No agent loop to build. Teams that want Claude doing long tasks get the harness, caching, compaction, memory and webhooks ready to use.
- Idle sessions sleep for free. Agents that wait a long time between messages pay runtime only while working, and resume on the next message.
- Host allowlists and your own workers. Teams with strict network rules can limit sandboxes to listed hosts, or run every tool call on their own infrastructure.
Use Instabox when
you have an invite and want to try a few free 4 vCPU / 8 GiB VMs with Docker, memory pause and mosh, running your own agent.
- A real VM with Docker and root. Agents that need Docker Compose or root get a Firecracker microVM with its own kernel, not a small container.
- Pause with memory. A paused machine keeps its memory and running programs and usually resumes in about a second.
- Free to try during the beta. If you have an invite, you can run 5 machines of 4 vCPU / 8 GiB for free while the beta lasts.
Where boat fits
Look at boat when your agents need more than either one gives today: a bigger machine with /dev/kvm, forks of running work, a disk that lasts and private links to what the agent builds. boat also runs Claude Code, Codex and other agents for you, on plans and limits that are published now.
A machine that can grow
Managed Agents caps a sandbox at 8 GB of memory with Docker in limited availability, and Instabox has one 4 vCPU / 8 GiB size and 5 machines per account. boat goes up to 16 vCPU / 32 GB, with /dev/kvm and no session cap on paid plans.
Fork running work and keep the disk
Managed Agents cannot fork and drops sandbox state 30 days after creation; Instabox forks only stopped machines, so an agent has to stop to branch. boat forks a running sandbox and saves its disk every minute.
Private links to what the agent builds
A Managed Agents sandbox has no inbound ports, so you copy the code elsewhere to try it. Instabox port URLs are open to anyone who finds them and go offline while paused. boat gives token-protected HTTPS on up to 50 ports, plus raw TCP.
Use boat when your agents need a real machine that can grow, forks of running work, private URLs, a disk that lasts and a choice of Claude Code, Codex or other agents, on terms published today. Compare it one to one: boat vs Claude Managed Agents and boat vs Instabox.
Questions people ask
Is Claude Managed Agents cheaper than Instabox?
It can't be compared yet. Instabox is free during its beta and publishes no price, while Managed Agents bills model tokens plus a runtime fee while a session runs. Until Instabox publishes a price, there is no bill to set side by side.
Which is faster, Claude Managed Agents or Instabox?
Neither has a comparable CPU measurement, so this page makes no speed claim either way. boat did 26.69 runs per second on the hpc-sandbox-benchmarks Node.js loop at 4 vCPU / 8 GB.
Can Claude Managed Agents or Instabox run Docker?
Instabox runs Docker and Docker Compose inside its microVMs, with root. Managed Agents lists Docker as limited availability. boat runs Docker, Compose and systemd, plus /dev/kvm for emulators and VMs.
Can I open a web app my agent built?
Not on Managed Agents, which has no inbound ports. Instabox publishes HTTPS URLs on up to 16 ports, but anyone with the URL can reach them and they go offline while the machine is paused. boat gives token-protected URLs on up to 50 ports.
Does Instabox start a machine in under a second?
Instabox says you are in a new machine's shell in under a second. Its docs say a paused machine usually resumes in about a second. Neither has been measured here.
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.
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