Railway vs Claude Managed Agents
Railway is an app platform that also rents Linux VM sandboxes you run commands in and destroy when you are done. Claude Managed Agents is Anthropic's hosted agent: you send Claude a task as events, and it works in a container that Anthropic runs.
The companies and products
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.
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.
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 366” means 15 of the other 365 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 | Railway: price rank | Claude Managed Agents: 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 and a disk that lasts; Railway destroys idle sandboxes, and a Managed Agents sandbox has at most 8 GB of memory and 10 GB of disk. | 51st of 367, with limits $342 a month | 106th of 367, with limits $964 a month | 3rd cheapest of 367 $634 a month |
| Always-on AI employees 50 machines 24/7 · 2 vCPU / 4 GB Railway fits always-on assistants once the idle timeout is set to 0 or you use a Cloud Agent; Managed Agents sessions sleep for free, but sandbox state expires 30 days after creation. | 16th cheapest of 366 $3,977 a month | 219th of 366, with limits $2,511 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 Railway suits short code runs because it bills for CPU used and destroys the sandbox after; Managed Agents runtime is cheap too, but every run sits inside a Claude session with tokens on top. | 36th cheapest of 345 $413 a month | 163rd of 345, with limits $756 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 Railway allows 100 sandboxes per environment on Pro, and a Managed Agents sandbox has no inbound ports for your users to open; boat gives each sandbox HTTPS URLs on up to 50 ports. | 42nd of 361, with limits $290 a month | 231st of 361, with limits $823 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 | 78th of 360, with limits $4,450 a month | 252nd of 360, with limits $3,978 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 | 108th of 364, with limits $364 a month | 244th of 364, with limits $320 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 Railway's sandbox docs do not mention Docker and Managed Agents lists it as limited availability, while boat has Docker and /dev/kvm on every machine. | 113th cheapest of 377 $1,210 a month | 227th of 377, with limits $96 a month | 4th cheapest of 377 $86 a month |
| 24/7 dev boxes 1 machine 24/7 · 4 vCPU / 8 GB Railway's Cloud Agents keep a disk but are early access and fixed at 4 vCPU / 4 GB on Pro; Managed Agents has no SSH at all. | 66th cheapest of 368 $89 a month | 224th of 368, with limits $48 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 has a desktop: Railway sandboxes are headless and Managed Agents ships headless Chromium only, while boat streams a full Linux desktop at 60fps. | 77th of 369, with limits $103 a month | 127th of 369, with limits $288 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 All three can script a browser; Managed Agents has Playwright with headless Chromium, and boat also shows the browser on a live desktop you can watch or take over. | 53rd of 367, with limits $93 a month | 126th of 367, with limits $288 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 | 60th cheapest of 346 $570 a month | 127th of 346, with limits $390 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 | 109th of 338, with limits $2,988 a month | 155th of 338, with limits $4,798 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 | 43rd of 360, with limits $574 a month | 179th of 360, with limits $160 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 | Railway | Claude Managed Agents | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | An app platform for services and databases, with VM sandboxes added in 2026 | A hosted Claude agent: Anthropic's harness runs Claude in a sandbox and you send it events | A sandbox platform: each agent gets its own full Linux machine, with coding agents built in |
| Isolation | Each sandbox is an isolated Linux VM; app services are containers | An isolated Linux container per session | Full VM with its own kernel on dedicated AMD Ryzen 9 9950X hosts |
| Machine size | Up to 8 vCPU / 8 GB on Hobby, 32 vCPU / 32 GB on Pro | Up to 8 GB memory and 10 GB disk; vCPU count not published; not configurable | 8 vCPU / 16 GB on the $20 plan, 16 vCPU / 32 GB from $100 |
| When the sandbox goes idle | Destroyed after the idle timeout (30 minutes by default); files survive only in checkpoints you take | Checkpointed and resumed on the next message, with idle time not billed; state kept only 30 days after the sandbox is created | You stop it; the disk is kept, with snapshots every minute and on stop, and a stopped sandbox costs nothing |
| Docker, systemd and /dev/kvm | Root shell on Ubuntu; the sandbox docs do not mention Docker or /dev/kvm | Docker in limited availability; root, systemd and /dev/kvm not documented | Root, Docker, systemd and /dev/kvm on every machine |
| Fork | Fork a running sandbox's filesystem; boot new ones from disk checkpoints | No fork or clone of a session or sandbox | Fork a running sandbox with its disk; start new ones from named snapshots |
| Reaching the sandbox | Up to 10 public HTTPS domains, set only at creation; SSH and port forwarding | No inbound ports or SSH; reached only through the sessions and events API | HTTPS URLs for up to 50 ports, token-protected; raw TCP; SSH |
| Agents | Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and Pi preinstalled; you run them headless through exec | Anthropic's harness with Claude models only, with SSE events, steering, memory stores and webhooks | Claude Code, Codex and more preinstalled, driven from outside with a prompt, steer and events API |
| Keeping API keys out of the sandbox | Secrets are set as environment variables inside the sandbox, or saved in a checkpoint | Vault secrets sit in the sandbox as placeholders and are swapped in at egress, per host | Credentials proxy for model providers and any HTTPS API; switch a credential to another account when credits run out |
| Browser and desktop | Headless: terminal, exec and SSH only | Headless Chromium with Playwright; no desktop or computer-use tool | Full Linux desktop streamed at 60fps, with Chromium, computer use and browser control |
| Apps and databases next to the sandbox | Deploy Postgres, Redis and services in the same project; a sandbox can join their private network | Agent sessions only; tools can also run on workers you host yourself | No hosted databases or app services; host your own inside a sandbox |
| Outbound rules | Open internet; static outbound IPs for services on Pro | Unrestricted, or limited to listed hosts plus optional package registries and MCP servers | Open internet, no provider-side allowlist |
| Sandboxes at once | 50 per environment on Hobby, 100 on Pro; Enterprise can ask for more | No published cap; 300 creates per minute per organization, and usage-tier spend limits | 100 to 2,000 by plan |
| Regions | US West, US East, Amsterdam and Singapore | US workspace geo only; inference can be global or US | EU only: Germany, Finland, France |
Every feature Battleships tracks (43)
| Feature | Railway | Claude Managed Agents | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full VM (own kernel) | Yes | No | Yes |
| Docker inside | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Nested virtualization | No | No | Yes |
| Root | Yes | 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 | Yes | No | Yes |
| Persistent disk | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Pause/resume | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Automatic snapshots | No | Yes | Yes |
| Fork/clone | Yes | No | Yes |
| Live fork (no pause) | Yes | 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 | No | Yes | No |
| HTTPS preview URLs | Yes | No | Yes |
| Raw TCP inbound | No | No | Yes |
| Public IPv4 | No | No | No |
| Egress allowlist | No | Yes | No |
| Secret proxy | No | Yes | Yes |
| Secret proxy for any API | No | 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 | No | No |
| Self-hosting | No | Yes | No |
| BYOC | Yes | Yes | No |
| Open source | No | No | No |
| Scoped API keys | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Spend limits | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Usage per sandbox (API) | No | Yes | Yes |
| Audit logs | Yes | Not published | No |
| SSO | Yes | Yes | No |
| SOC 2 | Yes | Yes | No |
| HIPAA | Yes | No | No |
| EU data residency | Yes | No | Yes |
| Zero data retention | Not published | No | Yes |
Performance
There is no comparable measurement for either. Railway and Managed Agents were not part of StarSling's hpc-sandbox-benchmarks run, and Anthropic does not publish how many vCPUs a Managed Agents sandbox gets. boat did 26.69 Node.js build-and-test runs per second at 4 vCPU / 8 GB in that benchmark.
Node.js build-and-test loop at 4 vCPU / 8 GB, higher is better. Measured with the open hpc-sandbox-benchmarks suite. Railway and Claude Managed Agents 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 | Railway, a month | Claude Managed Agents, 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 | $16 · Hobby · with limits | $13 · Claude API (pay-as-you-go, usage tiers) · with limits | $20 · $20/mo |
| One agent that never stops 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, running 24/7 all month | $70 · Hobby · with limits | $53 · Claude API (pay-as-you-go, usage tiers) · 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 | $739 · Hobby · with limits | $634 · Claude API (pay-as-you-go, usage tiers) · 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 | $223 · Pro · with limits | $360 · Claude API (pay-as-you-go, usage tiers) · 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 | $781 · Pro · with limits | $796 · Claude API (pay-as-you-go, usage tiers) · with limits | $2,000 · $2000/mo · with limits |
Railway: Railway bills sandboxes per second at $50 per vCPU-month on CPU actually used and $50 per GB-month on memory in use, plus $0.05 per GB out, and memory keeps billing while a sandbox waits. The Hobby ($5) and Pro ($20) fees count toward usage, and sandbox disk has no published price, so our bills leave it out.
Claude Managed Agents: Managed Agents bills model tokens at API rates plus a flat session runtime fee, measured to the millisecond only while a session is running, including time spent waiting on the model. The tables show runtime only; tokens come on top and usually cost more.
Claude Managed Agents: Plans start at $20 a month, and the whole fee is usage credit spent per second while a sandbox runs. A stopped sandbox costs nothing and keeps its disk; model tokens for the built-in agents are paid to your model provider.
Limits in those scenarios
Neither counts as a clean fit in any scenario: Railway is an app platform first with no published sandbox disk price, and Managed Agents is an agent platform whose sandbox size is not published beyond 8 GB of memory and 10 GB of disk. Railway 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 or an Enterprise limit. Managed Agents publishes no concurrent-session cap, only 300 creates per minute and usage-tier spend limits that pause all API use when reached. On boat, the 1,000-job burst is queued above 90 starts a minute and needs more starts per day than the $2,000 plan allows.
| Scenario | Railway | Claude Managed Agents | 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 Railway when
your app and databases already live on Railway, you want short-lived VMs on the same private network, or you need bigger machines or US and Asia regions.
- Your apps and databases in one place. Useful if your app already runs on Railway: sandboxes can join the same private network as your Postgres and services.
- Bigger machines and more regions. Useful for heavy jobs or users outside the US: up to 32 vCPU / 32 GB on Pro, in the US, Amsterdam or Singapore.
- Any agent, billed for CPU used. Useful if you run your own agent or code: Claude Code, Codex and others are preinstalled, and CPU bills only when used.
Use Claude Managed Agents when
you want Claude itself to do long, mostly 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.
Where boat fits
If what you are really running is coding agents that work for hours or days, look at boat. Railway gives you a VM that is destroyed when idle, and Managed Agents gives you Claude in a small container you cannot open from outside. boat gives each agent a full VM that keeps its disk, with Docker, a desktop, ports you can open and any coding agent you drive from outside.
A disk that stays
A Railway sandbox is destroyed after 30 idle minutes by default, and setting the timeout to 0 bills memory until you destroy it. Managed Agents keeps state only 30 days after the sandbox is created. boat saves the disk every minute and stops for free.
A real machine with Docker and a desktop
Railway's sandbox docs do not mention Docker or /dev/kvm, and Managed Agents has Docker only in limited availability, in a container with up to 8 GB of memory. Both are headless. boat has Docker, systemd, /dev/kvm and a 60fps desktop on every machine.
Any agent, steered from outside, keys kept out
On Railway you run agents through exec, with API keys inside the VM as environment variables. Managed Agents runs only Anthropic's harness with Claude models. boat lets you prompt and steer Claude Code, Codex and others by API, with keys held in a credentials proxy.
Use boat when your agents need a real machine that lasts: Docker, emulators, a desktop, ports you can open, a disk saved every minute, and the choice of Claude Code, Codex or other agents. Compare it one to one: boat vs Railway and boat vs Claude Managed Agents.
Questions people ask
Is Railway cheaper than Claude Managed Agents?
On runtime alone, Managed Agents is lower for one agent on workdays ($13 against $16), one agent that never stops ($53 against $70) and 50 agents in parallel ($634 against $739). Railway is lower for sandboxes for your users ($223 against $360) and 1,000 short jobs ($781 against $796). Managed Agents adds model tokens on top, and Railway's numbers leave out disk; boat comes to $20, $26, $317, $200 and $2,000 for the same five.
Which is faster, Railway or Claude Managed Agents?
We cannot say: neither has a result in StarSling's public CPU benchmark, and Anthropic does not publish the vCPU count of a Managed Agents sandbox. boat did 26.69 runs per second there at 4 vCPU / 8 GB.
Can Railway or Claude Managed Agents run Docker?
Railway's sandbox docs give you a root shell on Ubuntu but do not mention Docker or /dev/kvm. Managed Agents lists Docker as limited availability. boat has Docker, systemd and /dev/kvm on every machine.
Can I run Claude Code on Railway or Claude Managed Agents?
On Railway, yes: the default sandbox image includes Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and Pi, run headless through exec. Managed Agents runs Anthropic's own harness with Claude models instead. boat preinstalls Claude Code, Codex and others and lets you prompt and steer them by API.
What happens when the sandbox goes idle?
Railway destroys it after the idle timeout, 30 minutes by default, unless you saved a checkpoint. Managed Agents checkpoints it and resumes on the next message, but keeps state only 30 days after the sandbox is created. A boat sandbox stops, keeps its disk and costs nothing while stopped.
Where does my data run?
Railway has regions in California, Virginia, Amsterdam and Singapore. Managed Agents stores data and runs code in a US workspace geo only. boat runs only in the EU, in Germany, Finland and France.
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