Morph Cloud vs Railway
Morph Cloud sells full VMs for agents that can pause with their memory, branch into many copies and wake on the next request. Railway is a platform for apps and databases that added sandbox VMs in 2026, which are destroyed when they go idle and can join your app's private network.
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
Railway
Railway is a cloud platform for deploying web apps, servers and databases, which now also sells sandboxes and cloud agents.
Railway's main product is app hosting: you deploy services and databases as containers on its own hardware. In 2026 it added Sandboxes, isolated Linux VMs you create from the CLI or a TypeScript SDK, run commands in and destroy, and Cloud Agents, a personal VM for running a coding agent, in early access. It suits teams already hosting on Railway who want throwaway machines next to their apps.
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 | Railway: price rank | boat: price rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software factory 100 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 2,200 sessions of 8 h a month Railway sandboxes are destroyed when idle, so you save work in checkpoints, and Morph keeps work only when you pause or snapshot; boat saves the disk every minute and adds coding agents you drive by API. | 198th of 367, with limits $2,288 a month | 51st of 367, with limits $342 a month | 3rd cheapest of 367 $634 a month |
| Always-on AI employees 50 machines 24/7 · 2 vCPU / 4 GB An always-on assistant on Railway needs the idle timeout set to 0 or a Cloud Agent, and on Morph you build the agent, desktop and key handling yourself; boat ships all three. | 235th of 366, with limits $3,014 a month | 16th cheapest of 366 $3,977 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: Morph pauses a machine with its memory and wakes it on the next request, while Railway bills CPU used and destroys the sandbox when the job ends. | 16th cheapest of 345 $154 a month | 36th cheapest of 345 $413 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 Morph can pause each user's machine and wake it on the next request, while Railway allows 100 sandboxes per environment on Pro, so 300 at once means several environments. | 12th cheapest of 361 $905 a month | 42nd of 361, with limits $290 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 Morph's memory branching suits rollouts that all start from the same running state; Railway forks a sandbox's filesystem only, without memory. | 86th of 360, with limits $4,847 a month | 78th of 360, with limits $4,450 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 | 38th cheapest of 364 $675 a month | 108th of 364, with limits $364 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 documents Docker inside its VMs and sells managed GitHub Actions runners, while Railway's sandbox docs do not mention Docker. | 39th cheapest of 377 $355 a month | 113th cheapest of 377 $1,210 a month | 4th cheapest of 377 $86 a month |
| 24/7 dev boxes 1 machine 24/7 · 4 vCPU / 8 GB A Morph VM runs until you stop it unless you set a time to live, while Railway's Cloud Agents keep a disk but are early access and fixed at 4 vCPU / 4 GB on Pro. | 85th cheapest of 368 $116 a month | 66th cheapest of 368 $89 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 Railway sandboxes are headless and Morph has a remote desktop where you install the browser and agent yourself; boat ships a 60fps desktop with Chromium and a computer use API. | 182nd of 369, with limits $595 a month | 77th of 369, with limits $103 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 | 214th of 367, with limits $250 a month | 53rd of 367, with limits $93 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 | 60th cheapest of 346 $570 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 | 109th of 338, with limits $2,988 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 | 43rd of 360, with limits $574 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 | Railway | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kind of product | VMs for AI agents: MorphVM instances and Devbox workspaces | App platform for services and databases, with sandbox VMs added in 2026 | Full VM sandboxes for agents |
| Isolation | Full VM with its own kernel | Sandboxes are isolated Linux VMs; app services are containers | Full VM with its own kernel on dedicated AMD Ryzen 9 9950X hosts |
| Docker and nested virtualization | Root, Docker in Docker and local Kubernetes; nested virtualization is experimental | Root shell on Ubuntu; the sandbox docs do not mention Docker or /dev/kvm | Root, Docker, systemd and /dev/kvm on every machine |
| Pause with memory | Yes; resume brings back every process, and a paused VM bills only its snapshot | No; an idle sandbox is destroyed after its timeout (30 minutes by default) | No; the disk is kept and resume boots the machine again |
| Saving work automatically | Saved when you pause or snapshot; a plain stop deletes the instance | Files survive only in checkpoints you take before the sandbox is destroyed | Disk saved every minute and on every stop; a stopped sandbox costs nothing |
| Fork a running machine | Yes, with its memory, as many copies as you ask for, in under 250 ms | Yes, its filesystem only; named disk checkpoints boot new sandboxes | Yes, with its disk; named snapshots start new sandboxes |
| Wake on request | Yes; a paused VM resumes on the next HTTP request, SSH or exec call | No; an idle sandbox is destroyed rather than paused | No; a stopped sandbox is started by API |
| Coding agents | You install the agent, then drive it through a tmux API that sends keys and reads the screen | Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and Pi preinstalled; you run them headless through exec | Seven agents preinstalled, with a prompt, steer and events API |
| Keeping API keys out of the sandbox | Responses Proxy for model APIs; other secrets are handed to the machine | Secrets go into the sandbox as environment variables, or are signed in and saved in a checkpoint | Credentials proxy for model providers and any HTTPS API; switch a credential to another account when credits run out |
| Desktop and computer use | Browser-based remote desktop; you install the browser and any computer use agent | Headless: terminal, exec and SSH only | 60fps Linux desktop with Chromium and a computer use API |
| Inbound access | Named HTTP services with optional API key auth; SSH through Morph's gateway; no raw TCP | Up to 10 public HTTPS domains, set only at creation; SSH and port forwarding | HTTPS URLs for up to 50 ports, token-protected by default; raw TCP |
| Apps and databases next to the sandbox | Not listed; Morph's extras are managed GitHub Actions runners and a shared filesystem | Postgres, Redis and services in the same project; a sandbox can join their private network | No hosted databases or app services; host your own inside a sandbox |
| Guest systems | Linux, with experimental Windows and macOS (x86) | Linux (Ubuntu base) | Linux |
| Regions | Not published | US West, US East, Amsterdam and Singapore; new sandboxes start in US West | EU only: Germany, Finland and France, with zero data retention |
Every feature Battleships tracks (43)
| Feature | Morph Cloud | Railway | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full VM (own kernel) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Docker inside | Yes | Not published | Yes |
| Nested virtualization | Yes | No | Yes |
| Root | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Systemd | Yes | Not published | Yes |
| Desktop GUI | Yes | No | Yes |
| Browser | No | Yes | Yes |
| Computer-use API | No | No | Yes |
| SSH | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Persistent disk | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Pause/resume | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Automatic snapshots | Yes | No | Yes |
| Fork/clone | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Live fork (no pause) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Memory fork | Yes | 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 | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Raw TCP inbound | No | No | Yes |
| Public IPv4 | No | No | No |
| Egress allowlist | No | No | No |
| Secret proxy | Yes | No | Yes |
| Secret proxy for any API | No | No | Yes |
| Preinstalled agents | No | Yes | Yes |
| Agent harness API | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| MCP server | No | Yes | No |
| GPU | No | No | No |
| Windows | Yes | No | No |
| Arm64 | No | No | No |
| Self-hosting | No | No | No |
| BYOC | No | Yes | No |
| Open source | No | No | No |
| Scoped API keys | Yes | Not published | Yes |
| Spend limits | Not published | Yes | Yes |
| Usage per sandbox (API) | Yes | No | Yes |
| Audit logs | Yes | Yes | No |
| SSO | Not published | Yes | No |
| SOC 2 | Not published | Yes | No |
| HIPAA | Not published | Yes | No |
| EU data residency | Not published | Yes | Yes |
| Zero data retention | Not published | Not published | Yes |
Performance
There is no comparable measurement for either one: neither Morph Cloud nor Railway is in the hpc-sandbox-benchmarks run. 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. Morph says it restores a snapshot in under 250 ms, which measures 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 and Railway 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 | Morph Cloud, a month | Railway, 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 | $16 · Hobby · with limits | $20 · $20/mo |
| One agent that never stops 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, running 24/7 all month | $121 · Team | $70 · Hobby · with limits | $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 | $739 · Hobby · 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 | $325 · Scale | $223 · Pro · with limits | $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 | $781 · 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.
Railway: Railway bills sandboxes per second at $50 per vCPU-month on CPU actually used and $50 per GB-month on memory in use, which keeps billing while a sandbox waits, plus $0.05 per GB out. The Hobby ($5) and Pro ($20) fees count toward usage, and sandbox disk has no published price.
Railway: Plans start at $20 a month, and the whole fee is usage credit spent per second on running sandboxes. A stopped sandbox costs nothing and keeps its disk.
Limits in those scenarios
Railway marks every scenario as not a clean fit because it is an app platform first and does not price sandbox disk, so its bills count CPU and memory only. It also caps sandboxes per environment, 50 on Hobby and 100 on Pro, so 300 sandboxes for your users or 1,000 jobs at once need several environments. Morph's limits are account-wide pools instead: the Developer pool of 64 vCPU holds only 16 machines at 4 vCPU, disk past 16 GiB per MCU raises the bill, and egress prices are not published. boat queues the 1,000-job burst above 90 starts a minute.
| Scenario | Morph Cloud | Railway | 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 Morph Cloud when
your agents branch from one running state with its memory, sleep between requests and wake on demand, or need Docker, Kubernetes or experimental Windows and macOS guests.
- Branch a running VM with its memory. For agents that fan out from one running state: Morph copies a VM with its memory into many branches in under 250 ms.
- Pause and wake on request. For agents that sleep between requests: a paused VM bills only its snapshot and wakes on the next HTTP request, SSH or exec call.
- Docker, Kubernetes and other guest systems. For heavier builds: Morph documents Docker in Docker and local Kubernetes, plus experimental Windows and macOS (x86) guests.
Use Railway when
your app and databases already live on Railway and you want short-lived sandboxes on the same private network, or you need US or Asia regions.
- Your apps and databases in one place. For teams already on Railway: a sandbox can join the same private network as your Postgres, Redis and services.
- Regions in the US, EU and Asia. For users spread around the world: Railway runs in California, Virginia, Amsterdam and Singapore, picked per sandbox.
- Coding agents already in the image. For quick agent runs: Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and Pi come preinstalled, and you run them headless through exec.
Where boat fits
If what you are comparing is a home for coding, browsing or computer use agents, boat is built for that job. Every sandbox is a full VM that keeps its disk, with agents you drive by API, a desktop with Chromium, and real keys kept outside the machine.
Coding agents you drive from outside
On Morph you install the agent and drive it by sending keystrokes to tmux; on Railway you run it headless through exec and parse its output. boat gives every sandbox a prompt, steer and events API.
Real keys never enter the machine
Morph's Responses Proxy covers model APIs only, and Railway puts secrets in the sandbox as environment variables, where code the agent runs can read them. boat's credentials proxy covers any HTTPS API, such as GitHub or Stripe.
A desktop, Docker and KVM, with a disk that stays
Railway sandboxes are headless and destroyed when idle, and on Morph you install the browser yourself and a plain stop deletes the VM. boat ships a 60fps desktop, Docker and /dev/kvm, and saves the disk every minute.
Use boat when your agents work for hours or days: a full VM that keeps its disk, with Docker, a desktop with Chromium, and coding agents you drive by API while their keys stay outside. Compare it one to one: boat vs Morph Cloud and boat vs Railway.
Questions people ask
Is Morph Cloud cheaper than Railway?
On our tables Railway comes out lower in every scenario, for example $70 against $121 for one agent running all month and $739 against $1,459 for 50 agents in parallel. Railway's bills leave out disk, which it does not price, and its caps of 100 sandboxes per environment mean the bigger jobs need several environments. Morph's always-on price drops if the VM pauses when idle.
Which is faster, Morph Cloud or Railway?
We cannot say: neither has a result in the hpc-sandbox-benchmarks run. boat did 26.69 Node.js build-and-test runs per second at 4 vCPU / 8 GB there. Morph's under 250 ms figure is snapshot restore time, not CPU speed.
Can Railway or Morph Cloud run Docker?
Morph's docs show Docker, Docker in Docker and local Kubernetes inside its VMs, with nested virtualization as experimental. Railway's sandbox docs give a root shell on Ubuntu but do not mention Docker or /dev/kvm. boat has Docker, systemd and /dev/kvm on every machine.
What happens when a sandbox goes idle?
Railway destroys an idle sandbox after its timeout, 30 minutes by default, and only checkpoints you took survive. A Morph VM keeps running unless you set a time to live, and pausing keeps its memory while billing only the snapshot. A boat sandbox stops, keeps its disk and costs nothing while stopped.
Can I run Claude Code or Codex on each?
Yes. Railway preinstalls Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and Pi, and you run them headless through exec. On Morph you install them in a Devbox and drive them through a tmux API. boat preinstalls seven agents you prompt, steer and follow through an API.
Where does my data run?
Morph does not publish its regions. Railway runs in California, Virginia, Amsterdam and Singapore, and new sandboxes start in US West unless you pick a region. boat runs only in the EU, in Germany, Finland and France.
Try boat
Install the CLI, then run boat new.
7-day free trial