Morph Cloud vs Sprites
Both give each agent its own Linux VM that can pause and wake on the next request. Morph Cloud is built around snapshotting and branching a running machine with its memory, while Sprites is a fixed 8 vCPU Firecracker machine that sleeps on its own and bills only the CPU and memory it really uses.
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
Sprites
Sprites is Fly.io's product for agents: persistent Linux computers you create by API or CLI, which sleep when idle and wake on the next request.
Each Sprite is a Firecracker microVM with 8 vCPU, memory the platform manages, and a 100 GB ext4 disk that syncs to object storage. It runs one managed Ubuntu image with Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and Cursor preinstalled, gets an HTTPS URL that wakes it, and bills only for the CPU and memory it actually uses while awake. It is built for coding agents, dev environments and user code that sit idle most of the time.
- Isolation
- Firecracker microVM per Sprite
- Regions
- Not selectable for Sprites
- Free start
- $30 trial credit per organization
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 | Sprites: price rank | boat: price rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software factory 100 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 2,200 sessions of 8 h a month Morph runs Docker in Docker and local Kubernetes, Sprites runs Docker with no systemd and one public HTTP port, and boat adds preinstalled coding agents you drive by API. | 198th of 367, with limits $2,288 a month | 66th of 367, with limits $546 a month | 3rd cheapest of 367 $634 a month |
| Always-on AI employees 50 machines 24/7 · 2 vCPU / 4 GB An assistant that waits on a queue all month stays billed on Sprites only while held awake, and its open connections drop on every pause; Morph and boat keep the VM running. | 235th of 366, with limits $3,014 a month | 157th of 366, with limits $1,166 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 because both pause and wake on request; Morph Cloud ranks 16th here, ahead of Sprites, which sleeps about 30 seconds after the last command. | 16th cheapest of 345 $154 a month | 93rd of 345, with limits $140 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 Cloud can pause each user's machine and wake it on the next request; Sprites does too, but does not publish how many can run at once, and boat ranks 1st with token-protected HTTPS on up to 50 ports. | 12th cheapest of 361 $905 a month | 56th of 361, with limits $428 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 one running state; Sprites has no fork, and its checkpoints restore in place. | 86th of 360, with limits $4,847 a month | 105th of 360, with limits $6,540 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 | 125th of 364, with limits $545 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 Both run CI jobs, and Morph also sells managed GitHub Actions runners; builds that need /dev/kvm, such as Android emulators, run on boat. | 39th cheapest of 377 $355 a month | 63rd cheapest of 377 $476 a month | 4th cheapest of 377 $86 a month |
| 24/7 dev boxes 1 machine 24/7 · 4 vCPU / 8 GB A 24/7 dev box wants SSH and systemd: Morph has both, Sprites tunnels SSH through its CLI and does not run systemd, and boat has both with a disk saved every minute. | 85th cheapest of 368 $116 a month | 213th of 368, with limits $27 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 Sprites is headless and Morph has a browser-based remote desktop you set up yourself; boat streams a 60fps desktop with Chromium and a computer use API. | 182nd of 369, with limits $595 a month | 85th of 369, with limits $136 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 | 171st of 367, with limits $122 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 | 229th of 346, with limits $206 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 | 141st of 338, with limits $4,113 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 | 210th of 360, with limits $223 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 | Sprites | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Isolation | Full VM with its own kernel | Firecracker microVM with its own kernel | Full VM with its own kernel on dedicated AMD Ryzen 9 9950X hosts |
| Machine size | You choose; billed in MCUs, inside an account pool such as 64 vCPU on Developer | Fixed 8 vCPU and 100 GB disk; memory managed and scaled by the platform | You choose; up to 16 vCPU / 32 GB on the $100 plan and above |
| Root, Docker and systemd | Yes, including Docker in Docker and local Kubernetes | Root and Docker (with rough edges users report); no systemd | Yes, root, Docker and systemd |
| Nested virtualization | Experimental | Not in the docs | Yes, /dev/kvm for Android emulators and VMs |
| Idle behavior | Pauses with its memory when you ask or when a time to live you set ends; wakes on the next HTTP request, SSH or exec call | Pauses on its own about 30 seconds after activity stops; wakes in 100 to 500 ms with memory, or 1 to 2 s after a cold stop | Runs until you stop it or its time to live ends; started again by API |
| Branching a running machine | Snapshot and branch a running VM with its memory into many copies in under 250 ms | No fork; filesystem checkpoints restore in place | Fork a running sandbox with its disk into a new one |
| Work kept when stopped | Kept when you pause or snapshot; a plain stop deletes the instance | Disk syncs to object storage and survives; storage bills on the bytes you write | Disk saved every minute and on every stop; a stopped sandbox costs nothing |
| Coding agents | You install the agent, then drive it through a tmux API that sends keys and reads the screen | Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and Cursor preinstalled, run through exec or a console | Seven agents preinstalled, with a prompt, steer and events API to drive them from outside |
| Desktop and browser | Browser-based remote desktop; you install the browser and any computer use agent | Headless; no desktop or browser product | 60fps Linux desktop with Chromium and a computer use API |
| Keeping API keys out of the sandbox | Responses Proxy for model APIs; other secrets are handed to the machine | Connectors gateway for GitHub, Slack or any HTTP API, with path allow and block lists | 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 | One HTTPS URL to one HTTP port; other ports and SSH only through the sprite proxy CLI | HTTPS URLs for up to 50 ports, token-protected by default; raw TCP; SSH |
| Outbound rules | No provider-side egress allowlist | Optional DNS-based domain allowlist set from outside; private IPs always blocked | Open internet, no provider-side allowlist |
| Images and guest systems | Custom images; Linux, with experimental Windows and macOS (x86) | One managed Ubuntu 25.10 image you install on top of | Linux |
| Where data lives | Regions not published | Region not selectable | EU only (Germany, Finland, France), with EU data residency |
Every feature Battleships tracks (43)
| Feature | Morph Cloud | Sprites | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full VM (own kernel) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Docker inside | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Nested virtualization | Yes | No | Yes |
| Root | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Systemd | Yes | No | Yes |
| Desktop GUI | Yes | No | Yes |
| Browser | No | No | Yes |
| Computer-use API | No | No | Yes |
| SSH | Yes | No | Yes |
| Persistent disk | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Pause/resume | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Automatic snapshots | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Fork/clone | Yes | No | Yes |
| Live fork (no pause) | Yes | No | 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 | Yes | No |
| HTTPS preview URLs | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Raw TCP inbound | No | No | 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 | Yes | No |
| GPU | No | No | 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 | Not published | Yes |
| Spend limits | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Usage per sandbox (API) | Yes | No | Yes |
| Audit logs | Yes | Not published | No |
| SSO | Not published | Yes | No |
| SOC 2 | Not published | Yes | No |
| HIPAA | Not published | Yes | No |
| EU data residency | Not published | No | Yes |
| Zero data retention | Not published | Not published | Yes |
Performance
There is no comparable CPU measurement for Morph Cloud or Sprites: neither is in the hpc-sandbox-benchmarks run we use. 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's under 250 ms snapshot restore and Sprites' 100 to 500 ms wake 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 and Sprites 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 | Sprites, 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 | $23 · Pay-as-you-go | $20 · $20/mo |
| One agent that never stops 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, running 24/7 all month | $121 · Team | $92 · 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 | $1,459 · Scale | $1,120 · Pay-as-you-go | $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 | $314 · Pay-as-you-go · 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 | $1,134 · Pay-as-you-go · 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.
Sprites: Sprites bills CPU time at $0.0385 per CPU-hour and actual memory at $0.021875 per GB-hour, only while the Sprite is awake, plus storage on the bytes you write. Optional plans such as Hero at $100 a month include fixed allowances that are not credit.
Sprites: 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 prices each machine by its largest resource, so more than 16 GiB of disk per vCPU raises the bill, egress prices are not published, and the Developer pool of 64 vCPU holds only 16 machines at 4 vCPU. Sprites does not publish how many can run at once on pay as you go, so 300 sandboxes for your users and 1,000 jobs at once are not confirmed, and creation is 10 a minute without a plan. Morph Scale fits 1,000 short jobs at once at $869 a month, while boat's $2,000 plan queues starts above 90 a minute. A Sprite also stays billed for an always-on agent only while a task hold keeps it awake, for up to an hour at a time.
| Scenario | Morph Cloud | Sprites | 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 |
| 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, need a custom image or a size you pick, or when you also want managed CI runners.
- Branch a running machine 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.
- A machine shaped to the job. You pick the size and bring a custom image, with experimental Windows and macOS (x86) guests for agents that need them.
- Managed CI runners and a shared filesystem. Morph also sells GitHub Actions runners and a filesystem several machines can mount at once, billed from the same MCU balance.
Use Sprites when
your agents or apps sit idle most of the day and should sleep on their own, bill only real use and wake on a request, or when you need a domain allowlist.
- Sleeps on its own and bills real use. For agents and apps idle most of the day: a Sprite pauses after about 30 seconds and bills only CPU and memory it used.
- Egress allowlist and API connectors. Sprites can limit which domains an agent reaches and which API paths it can call through a stored token.
- Agents preinstalled and platform plugins. Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI and Cursor come preinstalled, and Sprites can back Claude Managed Agents or Cursor Cloud Agents.
Where boat fits
If you are choosing between Morph Cloud and Sprites to run coding or computer use agents for hours, boat is worth a look. It gives each agent a full VM that stays up, with coding agents you drive from outside, a 60fps desktop with Chromium, and hosting on many ports in the EU. Pick Morph for memory branching or Sprites for machines that nap between requests.
Coding agents you drive from outside
On Morph you install the agent and drive it by sending keystrokes to tmux and reading the screen. Sprites preinstalls agents but runs them through exec, so on both you write the harness that prompts and watches each one.
A desktop and browser ready to use
A Sprite is headless, and Morph's remote desktop comes without a browser or computer use API. On either, a browsing agent starts with you building the display, the browser and the screenshot and click loop.
A full machine that stays up
Sprites has no systemd or /dev/kvm, one public HTTP port, and drops connections on every pause. Morph lists nested virtualization as experimental and has no raw TCP. boat has systemd, /dev/kvm, 50 HTTPS ports and raw TCP.
Use boat when your agents need a full machine for hours: systemd, Docker and /dev/kvm, coding agents you drive from outside, a desktop with Chromium, many ports and raw TCP, in the EU. Compare it one to one: boat vs Morph Cloud and boat vs Sprites.
Questions people ask
Is Morph Cloud cheaper than Sprites?
In our scenarios Sprites comes out lower for one agent on workdays ($23 vs $32), one agent that never stops ($92 vs $121) and 50 agents in parallel ($1,120 vs $1,459). For 1,000 short jobs at once, Morph Scale fits at $869 a month, while Sprites does not publish enough concurrency to confirm a fit. boat is $20, $26 and $317 a month for the first three.
Which is faster, Morph Cloud or Sprites?
Neither has a CPU score in the hpc-sandbox-benchmarks run we use, so we cannot say. Morph restores a snapshot in under 250 ms and a Sprite wakes in 100 to 500 ms, but those are start times. boat did 26.69 runs per second on that test.
Can Morph Cloud and Sprites run Docker?
Both run Docker. Morph also runs Docker in Docker and local Kubernetes. On Sprites, a community report shows docker exec failing for containers whose main process is not root, and Sprites do not run systemd.
Can Sprites branch a running machine like Morph Cloud?
No. Sprites has no fork in its public API or CLI, and its checkpoints restore the disk in place. Morph branches a running VM with its memory into many copies, and boat forks a running sandbox with its disk.
Do both sleep when idle?
Sprites pauses on its own about 30 seconds after activity stops and wakes on the next request. Morph pauses when you ask or when a time to live you set ends with a pause, and wakes on the next HTTP request, SSH or exec call.
Can I SSH into Morph Cloud or Sprites?
Morph gives SSH through its gateway. On Sprites you install an SSH server yourself and tunnel it through the sprite proxy CLI. boat sandboxes have SSH, raw TCP and a dedicated IP.
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