Morph Cloud vs Freestyle
Morph Cloud and Freestyle both give each agent a full VM that can pause with its memory, fork while running and wake on the next request. Morph adds experimental Windows and macOS guests, managed CI runners and lower bills at scale, while Freestyle adds preinstalled agent CLIs, a default-deny firewall and credential injection beyond model APIs.
The companies and products
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
Freestyle
Freestyle sells full Linux virtual machines for AI agents, built for long running, complex tasks.
Each Freestyle VM is a KVM virtual machine with its own kernel, booted from an Ubuntu base snapshot with systemd, Docker and coding agent CLIs preinstalled. VMs can be paused with their memory, snapshotted while running, forked and woken by the next request, and every VM starts behind a default-deny firewall. It is built for teams that give each agent or each user its own machine, driven from a TypeScript SDK, a CLI or an API.
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. “16th cheapest of 345” means 15 of the other 344 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 | Morph Cloud: price rank | Freestyle: price rank | boat: price rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software factory 100 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 2,200 sessions of 8 h a month Both run Docker and full builds; Freestyle preinstalls agent CLIs, Morph has you install them, and boat adds an API to drive the agents inside from outside. | 198th of 367, with limits $2,288 a month | 241st of 367, with limits $3,311 a month | 3rd cheapest of 367 $634 a month |
| Always-on AI employees 50 machines 24/7 · 2 vCPU / 4 GB | 235th of 366, with limits $3,014 a month | 263rd of 366, with limits $4,195 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 fit short code runs, since a paused VM keeps its memory and wakes on the next request; Morph Cloud ranks 16th and Freestyle 40th on cost. | 16th cheapest of 345 $154 a month | 40th cheapest of 345 $482 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 Both pause each user's machine and wake it on demand; Morph Cloud ranks 12th, Freestyle 16th, and boat ranks 1st with HTTPS on up to 50 ports per user. | 12th cheapest of 361 $905 a month | 16th cheapest of 361 $1,358 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 Both can snapshot a running VM with its memory and start many copies from it, which suits rollouts that branch from one state. | 86th of 360, with limits $4,847 a month | 107th of 360, with limits $6,600 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 Both fit many short agent runs from one saved state; boat ranks 10th here with fresh sandboxes forked from a running one. | 38th cheapest of 364 $675 a month | 53rd cheapest of 364 $1,046 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 Morph also sells managed GitHub Actions runners, while Freestyle's docs say CPU-heavy jobs like kernel builds are better served elsewhere. | 39th cheapest of 377 $355 a month | 168th of 377, with limits $625 a month | 4th cheapest of 377 $86 a month |
| 24/7 dev boxes 1 machine 24/7 · 4 vCPU / 8 GB | 85th cheapest of 368 $116 a month | 98th cheapest of 368 $151 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 Neither ships a ready desktop agent: Morph offers remote desktop access and Freestyle has install guides, while boat ships a 60fps desktop with computer use. | 182nd of 369, with limits $595 a month | 234th of 369, with limits $940 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 On both you install Chromium yourself, by Docker on Morph or with a virtual display on Freestyle; boat has Chromium ready in every sandbox. | 214th of 367, with limits $250 a month | 257th of 367, with limits $482 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 | 239th of 346, with limits $234 a month | 278th of 346, with limits $482 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 | 154th of 338, with limits $4,750 a month | 183rd of 338, with limits $6,560 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 | 214th of 360, with limits $228 a month | 272nd of 360, with limits $482 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 | Morph Cloud | Freestyle | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Isolation | Full VM with its own kernel | Full KVM VM with its own kernel on bare metal servers | Full VM with its own kernel on dedicated AMD Ryzen 9 9950X hosts |
| CPU benchmark (4 vCPU / 8 GB) | Not measured | 9.64 runs/s | 26.69 runs/s |
| Root, Docker and nested virtualization | Yes, with Docker in Docker and local Kubernetes; nested virtualization is experimental | Yes; systemd is pid 1, Docker runs from boot, full KVM support | Yes, with systemd and /dev/kvm for Android emulators and VMs |
| Pause with memory and wake on request | Yes; resumes all processes, and wakes on the next HTTP request, SSH or exec call | Yes; resumes the same processes, and wakes on the next traffic after an idle pause | No; disk is saved and a stopped sandbox is started by API |
| Fork a running machine | Yes, with its memory, as many copies as you ask for, in under 250 ms | Yes, clone without pausing; snapshots capture memory and disk | Yes, with its disk |
| Saving work when idle | Saved when you pause or snapshot; a plain stop deletes the instance | A paused VM keeps memory and disk and bills for storage; no idle timeout unless you set one | Disk saved every minute and on every stop; a stopped sandbox is free |
| Coding agents | You install the agent, then drive it through a tmux API that sends keys and reads the screen | claude, codex, opencode and openclaw preinstalled, driven through exec or a terminal | Seven agents preinstalled, with a prompt, steer and events API |
| Desktop, browser and computer use | Browser-based remote desktop; you install the browser and any computer use agent | Guides to install GNOME or Xvfb, VNC and Chromium yourself | Linux desktop streamed at 60fps, Chromium and computer use built in |
| Keeping API keys out of the sandbox | Responses Proxy for model APIs only; other secrets are handed to the machine | Credentials injected at the edge for HTTPS headers, Postgres and S3 | Credentials proxy for model providers and any HTTPS API; switch a credential to another account when credits run out |
| Inbound access | Named HTTP services with optional API key auth; SSH through Morph's gateway; no raw TCP | HTTPS on free style.dev names or your own domain, forward auth, other public protocols | HTTPS URLs for up to 50 ports, token-protected by default; raw TCP |
| Outbound rules | Open internet, no provider-side allowlist | Default-deny firewall with allow rules by IP, VM, VPC or exact domain | Open internet, no provider-side allowlist |
| Guest systems | Linux, with experimental Windows and macOS (x86) | Linux | Linux |
| Managed CI runners and shared filesystem | GitHub Actions runners in three sizes and a filesystem many machines mount at once | No | No; run your own runner inside a sandbox |
| Where data lives | Regions not published | Not listed; the docs name a San Jose, US data center | EU only (Germany, Finland, France), with zero data retention |
Every feature Battleships tracks (43)
| Feature | Morph Cloud | Freestyle | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full VM (own kernel) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Docker inside | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Nested virtualization | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Root | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Systemd | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Desktop GUI | Yes | No | Yes |
| Browser | No | No | Yes |
| Computer-use API | No | No | Yes |
| SSH | Yes | 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 | Yes | Yes |
| Public IPv4 | No | No | No |
| Egress allowlist | No | Yes | No |
| Secret proxy | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Secret proxy for any API | No | Yes | Yes |
| Preinstalled agents | No | Yes | Yes |
| Agent harness API | Yes | No | Yes |
| MCP server | No | No | No |
| GPU | No | Yes | No |
| Windows | Yes | No | No |
| Arm64 | No | No | No |
| Self-hosting | No | No | No |
| BYOC | No | No | No |
| Open source | No | No | No |
| Scoped API keys | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Spend limits | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Usage per sandbox (API) | Yes | No | Yes |
| Audit logs | Yes | Yes | No |
| SSO | Not published | Yes | No |
| SOC 2 | Not published | Not published | No |
| HIPAA | Not published | Not published | No |
| EU data residency | Not published | No | Yes |
| Zero data retention | Not published | Not published | Yes |
Performance
On the hpc-sandbox-benchmarks Node.js build-and-test loop at 4 vCPU / 8 GB, Freestyle did 9.64 runs per second and boat did 26.69, so boat did about 2.8 times as much CPU work in the same time. Morph Cloud is not in that run, so there is no comparable measurement for it. Morph says it restores a snapshot in under 250 ms and Freestyle advertises VM starts in about 65 ms, which measure 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. 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 | Morph Cloud, a month | Freestyle, 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 | $32 · Developer | $27 · Free | $20 · $20/mo |
| One agent that never stops 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, running 24/7 all month | $121 · Team | $159 · Free | $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 | $1,459 · Scale | $2,139 · Pro | $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 | $325 · Scale | $581 · Pro | $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 | $869 · Scale | $1,305 · Pro · with limits | $2,000 · $2000/mo · with limits |
Morph Cloud: Morph bills MCUs at $0.05 each: per hour, a machine uses 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 storage.
Freestyle: Freestyle bills per second for the vCPU, RAM and disk allocated to a VM, busy or idle, after monthly allowances of 200 vCPU-hours, 400 GiB-hours of RAM and 60,000 GiB-hours of storage. On Free those allowances are hard stops; Hobby and Pro set a $50 or $500 monthly minimum that counts as usage.
Freestyle: 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
Morph's limits are account-wide resource pools: the Developer pool of 64 vCPU holds only 16 machines at 4 vCPU, and egress prices are not published. Freestyle caps concurrent VMs by plan, 10 on Free, 40 on Hobby and 400 on Pro, which is why it does not fit 1,000 short jobs at once while Morph Scale does. On Freestyle Free the monthly allowances are hard stops, and neither provider pauses an idle VM unless you set a timeout. boat has no session cap on paid plans, but at 1,000 short jobs at once its $2,000 plan queues starts above 90 a minute.
| Scenario | Morph Cloud | Freestyle | 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 | None that bite |
| 1,000 short jobs at once |
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Which one should you use?
Use Morph Cloud when
you need experimental Windows or macOS guests, managed GitHub Actions runners or a shared filesystem, or the lower bill for large fleets and bursts of short jobs.
- Windows and macOS guests. For agents that must test desktop software beyond Linux, Morph lists experimental Windows and macOS (x86) guests.
- Managed CI runners and a shared filesystem. Teams that want GitHub Actions runners and a filesystem many machines mount at once can get both from one MCU balance.
- Lower bills at scale. In four of the five scenarios here Morph costs less, and it fits 1,000 short jobs at once where Freestyle Pro does not.
Use Freestyle when
each VM must start behind a default-deny firewall, when you want agent CLIs preinstalled and credentials injected for HTTPS, Postgres and S3, or when one job needs up to 32 vCPU.
- Default-deny network. For agents that must reach only what you allow, every VM starts behind a firewall with rules by IP, VM, VPC or domain.
- Agent CLIs and credential injection. claude, codex, opencode and openclaw come preinstalled, and credentials are injected at the edge for HTTPS, Postgres and S3.
- Bigger machines. For one large job, Pro VMs go up to 32 vCPU / 64 GiB, and custom limits reach 64 vCPU / 128 GiB.
Where boat fits
Both Morph Cloud and Freestyle are strongest when VMs sleep between requests and wake with their memory. If your agents instead work for hours on builds, tests, browsers and desktops, boat gives each one a faster machine with the agents, the desktop and the key handling already inside. Disk is saved every minute, a stopped sandbox is free, and data stays in the EU.
Faster CPUs for long agent work
Coding agents spend most of their time on installs, builds and tests. Freestyle did 9.64 runs per second on the CPU benchmark and boat did 26.69; Morph has no comparable measurement, so you would have to test it yourself.
Agents you drive from outside
On Morph you send keystrokes through tmux and read the screen; on Freestyle you start the CLI through exec and parse its output. boat gives you a prompt, steer and events API, so you never build that harness.
A desktop and browser, ready
Morph has you install the browser and any computer use agent, and Freestyle's guides install GNOME or Xvfb, VNC and Chromium. Either way you build and maintain the display stack and the click loop before your agent can work.
Use boat when your agents do real work for hours: builds, tests, Docker, emulators, a desktop and a browser, on fast CPUs, with an API to drive the agents inside from outside and data kept in the EU. Compare it one to one: boat vs Morph Cloud and boat vs Freestyle.
Questions people ask
Is Morph Cloud cheaper than Freestyle?
In four of the five scenarios on this page, yes. One agent running all month is $121 on Morph against $159 on Freestyle, and 50 agents in parallel is $1,459 against $2,139. For one coding agent on workdays Freestyle is lower, $27 against $32.
Which is faster, Morph Cloud or Freestyle?
Only Freestyle has a CPU score: 9.64 runs per second on the hpc-sandbox-benchmarks test at 4 vCPU / 8 GB, against 26.69 for boat. Morph Cloud is not in that run. For start time, Morph claims snapshot restores under 250 ms and Freestyle claims VM starts in about 65 ms.
Can Morph Cloud and Freestyle run Docker?
Yes. Both are full VMs with root and Docker inside. Freestyle has full KVM support for nested virtualization, while Morph lists nested virtualization as experimental.
Can I run Claude Code on Morph Cloud or Freestyle?
Yes. Freestyle preinstalls claude, codex, opencode and openclaw, and you run them through exec or a terminal. On Morph you install the agent in a Devbox and drive it through a tmux API. boat preinstalls seven agents with an API to prompt and steer them.
Does either support Windows?
Morph lists experimental Windows and macOS (x86) guests next to Linux. Freestyle's VMs are Linux, booted from an Ubuntu 24.04 base snapshot.
Can both pause a VM with its memory?
Yes. Both pause a VM with its memory, bill only storage while it sleeps, and wake it on the next request. Both can also fork a running VM. boat saves the disk instead, so resuming boots the machine again.
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