Claude Managed Agents vs Upstash Box
Claude Managed Agents is Anthropic's hosted agent: you send Claude a task as events, and it works in a container that Anthropic runs. Upstash Box is a container you rent and drive yourself, with Claude Code, Codex or OpenCode built in, a public URL per port, and a pause when it sits idle.
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.
Upstash Box
Upstash Box is a cloud computer for AI agents from Upstash, the company known for serverless Redis, Vector and QStash.
Each box is a Docker container with its own filesystem, shell, git and an optional coding agent such as Claude Code, Codex or OpenCode, which you drive from TypeScript or Python SDKs. A box pauses when it sits idle, keeps its files, and you pay for the CPU it actually uses. Upstash built it to run its own Context7 service and opened it to everyone in March 2026.
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 | Upstash Box: price rank | boat: price rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software factory 100 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 2,200 sessions of 8 h a month A software factory needs Docker for databases and test services: Managed Agents lists Docker only in limited availability, Upstash does not offer it inside a box, and boat runs it in every VM. | 106th of 367, with limits $964 a month | 61st of 367, with limits $464 a month | 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 state only 30 days after creation; an Upstash keep-alive box stays on all month, and boat keeps a full VM and its disk as long as you want. | 219th of 366, with limits $2,511 a month | 103rd of 366, with limits $475 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 Upstash Box ranks 10th here: an idle box costs no CPU, which suits short bursts of code better than Managed Agents or boat. | 163rd of 345, with limits $756 a month | 10th cheapest of 345 $119 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 Upstash Box ranks 2nd and boat ranks 1st; Managed Agents sandboxes have no inbound ports, so your users cannot open what runs inside. | 231st of 361, with limits $823 a month | 2nd cheapest of 361 $222 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 | 252nd of 360, with limits $3,978 a month | 352nd of 360, with limits $8,068 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 | 244th of 364, with limits $320 a month | 52nd cheapest of 364 $1,011 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 CI jobs that build images or Android apps need Docker and /dev/kvm, which boat has and neither Managed Agents nor Upstash documents. | 227th of 377, with limits $96 a month | 120th cheapest of 377 $1,520 a month | 4th cheapest of 377 $86 a month |
| 24/7 dev boxes 1 machine 24/7 · 4 vCPU / 8 GB Upstash gives a light dev box with SSH through a gateway, Managed Agents has no SSH at all, and boat gives a full VM with root, Docker and a 50 GB disk. | 224th of 368, with limits $48 a month | 10th cheapest of 368 $20 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 Both Managed Agents and Upstash ship only a headless Chromium with no desktop, while boat streams a full Linux desktop at 60fps. | 127th of 369, with limits $288 a month | 73rd of 369, with limits $76 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 Managed Agents scripts Chromium with Playwright and Upstash adds AI page actions over CDP; boat shows the browser on a live desktop you can watch or take over. | 126th of 367, with limits $288 a month | 49th of 367, with limits $38 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 | 127th of 346, with limits $390 a month | 37th cheapest of 346 $400 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 | 155th of 338, with limits $4,798 a month | 200th of 338, with limits $8,000 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 | 179th of 360, with limits $160 a month | 225th of 360, with limits $259 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 | Claude Managed Agents | Upstash Box | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | A hosted Claude agent: Anthropic's harness runs Claude in a sandbox and you send it events | A cloud computer for agents: a container you drive with SDKs, with a coding agent built in | A sandbox platform: each agent gets its own full Linux VM, with coding agents built in |
| Isolation | Isolated Linux container per session on Anthropic-managed infrastructure | Docker container per box on AWS | 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 | Small 2 vCPU / 4 GB / 5 GB, Medium 4 vCPU / 8 GB / 10 GB, Large 8 vCPU / 16 GB / 20 GB | Up to 16 vCPU / 32 GB on the $100 plan and above; 50 GB disk at the default 4 vCPU / 8 GB |
| Docker, systemd and /dev/kvm | Docker listed as limited availability; root, systemd and /dev/kvm not documented | Docker inside not documented; the box is itself a container; no VM support | Root, Docker, systemd and /dev/kvm for Android emulators and nested VMs |
| What persists | Sandbox is checkpointed when a session goes idle; state is kept only 30 days after the sandbox is created | Box pauses when idle and keeps its files; storage keeps billing while paused | The whole disk, saved every minute and on stop; a stopped sandbox costs nothing |
| Wake on demand | An idle session resumes from its checkpoint on the next message | A request to a public URL resumes a paused box and waits for the app | No; a stopped sandbox is started by API |
| Fork | No fork or clone of a session or sandbox | Snapshot a running box and start many new boxes from it | Fork a running sandbox with its disk |
| Inbound access | No inbound ports or SSH; reached only through the sessions and events API | HTTPS URL per port, public unless you add a token or basic auth; SSH through a gateway; no raw TCP | 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 | Managed headless Chromium with AI page actions and CDP; no desktop | Full Linux desktop streamed at 60fps, with Chromium and computer use |
| Agents | Anthropic's harness with Claude models only, with steering, multiagent threads, memory stores and webhooks | Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode built in, with run and stream APIs, webhooks and scheduled prompts | 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 sit in the sandbox as placeholders and are swapped in at egress, per host | Host proxy injects headers into outbound HTTPS on port 443; set when the box is created | Credentials proxy for model providers and any HTTPS API; switch a credential to another account when credits run out |
| Outbound rules | Unrestricted, or limited to listed hosts plus optional package registries and MCP servers | Allow all, deny all, or allow and deny by domain and CIDR, changeable on a running box | Open internet, no provider-side allowlist |
| Self-hosting | Self-hosted sandboxes run tools on your own workers while Anthropic keeps the orchestration | No | No |
| Where it runs | US workspace geo only; inference can be global or US | US only (AWS us-east-1) | EU only (Germany, Finland, France) |
Every feature Battleships tracks (43)
| Feature | Claude Managed Agents | Upstash Box | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full VM (own kernel) | No | No | Yes |
| Docker inside | Not published | No | Yes |
| Nested virtualization | No | No | Yes |
| Root | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Systemd | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Desktop GUI | No | No | Yes |
| Browser | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Computer-use API | No | No | 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 | Yes | 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 | Yes | No |
| HTTPS preview URLs | No | Yes | Yes |
| Raw TCP inbound | No | No | Yes |
| Public IPv4 | No | No | No |
| Egress allowlist | Yes | Yes | No |
| Secret proxy | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Secret proxy for any API | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Preinstalled agents | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Agent harness API | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| MCP server | Yes | Yes | No |
| GPU | No | No | No |
| Windows | No | No | No |
| Arm64 | No | Yes | No |
| Self-hosting | Yes | No | No |
| BYOC | Yes | No | No |
| Open source | No | No | No |
| Scoped API keys | Not published | Not published | 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 | Yes | No |
| HIPAA | No | No | No |
| EU data residency | No | No | Yes |
| Zero data retention | No | Not published | Yes |
Performance
There is no comparable measurement for either one: neither Claude Managed Agents nor Upstash Box was part of the hpc-sandbox-benchmarks CPU run, and Anthropic does not publish how many vCPUs a sandbox gets. 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. Claude Managed Agents and Upstash Box 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 | Upstash Box, 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 | $21 · Pay as You Go | $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 | $21 · Pay as You Go | $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 | $900 · Pay as You Go · with limits | $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 | $306 · Pay as You Go | $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 | $1,822 · Pay as You Go | $2,000 · $2000/mo · with limits |
Claude Managed Agents: Managed Agents bills a flat $0.08 per session-hour, measured only while the session is running, including time spent waiting on the model. Model tokens are billed on top at API rates and are not in the table, and they usually cost more than the runtime.
Upstash Box: A standard box is billed for the CPU it actually uses, at $0.10, $0.20 or $0.40 per active CPU hour for Small, Medium and Large, plus $0.10 per GB-month of storage, and RAM is free. A keep-alive box costs a flat $8, $16 or $32 a month with CPU and storage included.
Upstash Box: 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, its vCPU count is not published, and Docker is in limited availability, so no scenario counts as a clean fit for it; Anthropic also publishes no concurrent-session cap. Upstash fits four of the five scenarios but not 50 agents with Docker, its disks stop at 20 GB, and its egress price is not published. boat fits four too; for 1,000 short jobs at once it starts at most 90 per minute and 2,400 a day, so the burst is queued.
| Scenario | Claude Managed Agents | Upstash Box | 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 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.
- Run tools on your own workers. Teams with strict rules can run every tool call on their own infrastructure while Anthropic keeps the orchestration.
Use Upstash Box when
you want to run Claude Code, Codex or OpenCode in light containers that wake on a request, burst to 1,000 at once, and follow strict outbound rules.
- Your choice of coding agent. Teams that already use Claude Code, Codex or OpenCode can run them in a box and drive them from TypeScript or Python.
- Idle costs no CPU, and a request wakes the box. Good for user-facing agents that are quiet most of the day: a request to the box's URL wakes it.
- Big bursts and fine network rules. Runs 1,000 boxes at once by default, with allow and deny rules by domain and CIDR you can change live.
Where boat fits
Both Managed Agents and Upstash Box put the agent in a container, so they work best for agents that mostly read, write and run code. If your agents need Docker, an emulator, a desktop, open ports or a big disk that lasts, look at boat, which gives each one a full VM with coding agents you drive from outside.
A whole machine, not a container
Managed Agents lists Docker only in limited availability and Upstash does not offer it inside a box, so the 50-agent scenario with Docker fits neither. A boat VM has root, Docker, systemd and /dev/kvm.
Open and watch what the agent builds
A Managed Agents sandbox has no inbound ports at all, and both give only a headless browser. boat gives HTTPS URLs on up to 50 ports, raw TCP, SSH and a Linux desktop streamed at 60fps.
A disk that lasts and has room
Managed Agents keeps 10 GB of state for only 30 days, and Upstash tops out at 20 GB on its Large box, with storage billed while paused. boat gives 50 GB by default, saved every minute, and stops are free.
Use boat when your agents need a real machine: Docker, emulators, a desktop, ports you can open, a disk that lasts, and the choice of Claude Code, Codex or other agents. Compare it one to one: boat vs Claude Managed Agents and boat vs Upstash Box.
Questions people ask
Is Claude Managed Agents cheaper than Upstash Box?
For runtime alone it depends on the shape. One coding agent on workdays costs $13 a month on Managed Agents against $21 on Upstash, but an agent that never stops costs $53 against $21, and sandboxes for your users cost $360 against $306. Managed Agents also bills model tokens on top, which are not in these numbers.
Which is faster, Claude Managed Agents or Upstash Box?
There is no comparable measurement: neither was in the hpc-sandbox-benchmarks CPU run, and Anthropic does not publish a sandbox's vCPU count. Upstash publishes its sizes, from 2 vCPU up to 8 vCPU. boat did 26.69 runs per second on that test at 4 vCPU / 8 GB.
Can Claude Managed Agents or Upstash Box run Docker?
Managed Agents lists Docker only in limited availability. Upstash does not offer Docker inside a box, which is itself a container, and custom images are listed as coming soon. boat sandboxes are full VMs where Docker, docker compose and systemd work as on any Linux server.
Can I run Claude Code on Claude Managed Agents or Upstash Box?
Not on Managed Agents, which runs Anthropic's own harness with Claude models. Upstash Box has Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode built in. boat has Claude Code, Codex and five other agents preinstalled, driven from outside through one API.
Can I open a web app my agent built?
On Managed Agents, not directly: the sandbox has no inbound ports and is reached only through the sessions API. Upstash gives an HTTPS URL per port, public unless you add a token. boat gives HTTPS URLs on up to 50 ports, token-protected by default, plus raw TCP and SSH.
Where do Claude Managed Agents and Upstash Box run?
Both run in the US: Managed Agents offers only a US workspace geo today, and Upstash Box runs in AWS us-east-1. boat runs in the EU, in Germany, Finland and France.
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