Runloop vs Claude Managed Agents
Runloop rents you devboxes, micro-VMs where you run Claude Code, Codex or your own agent. Claude Managed Agents is Anthropic's hosted agent: you send Claude a task and it works in a small container that Anthropic runs.
The companies and products
Runloop
Runloop is a US platform of sandboxes, called devboxes, for building, running and testing AI coding agents.
You get Linux devboxes built from Dockerfile-style blueprints, disk snapshots, HTTPS tunnels, agent gateways that hide API keys, and Axons, event streams that drive agents such as Claude Code. Each devbox runs in a micro-VM on Runloop's own bare-metal hypervisor, with a container layer inside. It is built for teams shipping coding agents, plus evaluation and RL fine-tuning work on the Enterprise plan.
- Compliance
- SOC 2 Type 2
- Architectures
- x86_64 and arm64 base blueprints
- Own-cloud deploy
- Deploy to VPC on AWS, GCP and Azure (Enterprise)
- Regions
- Not documented or selectable
- Company
- Runloop AI, Inc.
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. “20th cheapest of 367” means 19 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 | Runloop: 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 Runloop gives a coding agent a devbox with Docker on its dnd blueprints, while Managed Agents offers a container with up to 8 GB of memory and Docker only in limited availability; boat adds /dev/kvm and keeps the disk on every plan. | 20th cheapest of 367 $8,152 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 Both can sleep an idle agent and wake it: Runloop on the Pro plan through an HTTP request, Managed Agents on the next message, with sandbox files kept only 30 days after creation. | 32nd cheapest of 366 $10,194 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 Managed Agents bills runtime only while the agent works, and Runloop starts many short runs without published start limits, so both suit short bursts better than boat's queued starts. | 44th cheapest of 345 $525 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 Your users can open a Runloop devbox through its HTTPS tunnel, but a Managed Agents sandbox has no inbound ports; boat gives each sandbox HTTPS URLs on up to 50 ports. | 26th cheapest of 361 $3,301 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 Runloop ranks 4th for RL rollouts: it starts large waves without published start limits and sells RL fine-tuning on Enterprise, which Managed Agents does not offer. | 4th cheapest of 360 $15,922 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 | 81st cheapest of 364 $2,562 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 Runloop runs Docker-in-Docker for builds and Managed Agents lists Docker as limited availability; boat's faster CPUs finish builds and tests sooner. | 121st cheapest of 377 $1,554 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 A dev box needs SSH and a lasting disk: Runloop has SSH through a TLS proxy, Managed Agents has no SSH, and boat keeps the disk until you delete it. | 113th cheapest of 368 $410 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 Runloop ships a desktop and browser your agent can control, Managed Agents only headless Chromium with Playwright, and boat streams a full Linux desktop at 60fps. | 39th cheapest of 369 $2,306 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 | 40th cheapest of 367 $1,153 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 | 68th cheapest of 346 $781 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 | 266th of 338, with limits $15,611 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 | 10th cheapest of 360 $770 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 | Runloop | Claude Managed Agents | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | A sandbox platform: devboxes for building, running and testing your coding agents | 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 | Micro-VM on a custom bare-metal hypervisor, plus a container layer | Isolated Linux container per session | Full VM with its own kernel on dedicated AMD Ryzen 9 9950X hosts |
| Machine size | Sizes such as 4 vCPU / 8 GiB and 2 vCPU / 4 GiB; disk up to 64 GiB | Up to 8 GB memory and 10 GB disk; vCPU not published; not configurable | Up to 16 vCPU / 32 GB on the $100 plan and above |
| Docker, systemd and /dev/kvm | Docker as root on the dnd blueprints; nested virtualization not documented | Docker listed as limited availability; root, systemd and /dev/kvm not documented | Root, Docker, systemd and nested virtualization for Android emulators and VMs |
| CPU architecture | x86_64 and arm64 | x86_64 (Ubuntu 24.04) | x86_64 only |
| Keeping files | Disk kept through suspend (Pro plan) or manual disk snapshots; shutdown ends the devbox | Sandbox checkpointed when a session goes idle; state kept only 30 days after the sandbox is created | Snapshot every minute and on stop, on every plan, for as long as you keep the sandbox |
| Long runs | Fixed lifetime 1 hour by default, 48 hours max; an idle policy replaces it | Long sessions that sleep between messages; no session length cap published | No session cap on paid plans; default TTL 1 hour, changeable |
| Idle sleep and wake | Suspend after idle, wake on an HTTP request to the tunnel (Pro) | Idle session resumes from its checkpoint on the next message; idle time is not billed | No idle timer; a stopped sandbox is started by API |
| Inbound access | One HTTPS tunnel per devbox covering its ports; SSH through a TLS proxy; no public IP | No inbound ports or SSH; reached only through the sessions and events API | HTTPS URLs for up to 50 ports, token-protected by default; raw TCP; SSH; dedicated IPv6 or IPv4 |
| Browser and desktop | Browser and desktop your agent can control | Headless Chromium with Playwright; no desktop or computer-use tool | Full Linux desktop streamed at 60fps, with Chromium and computer use |
| Agents | Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Gemini CLI, DeepAgents, driven through Axons and Broker | Anthropic's harness with Claude models only, with steering, memory stores, multiagent threads and webhooks | Claude Code, Codex, pi, OpenCode, Prime Agent, Kimi Code, Mistral Vibe, driven from outside with a prompt, steer and events API |
| Keeping API keys out of the sandbox | Agent gateways for any API endpoint with bearer, header or basic auth | Vault secrets live 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 |
| Outbound rules | Hostname allowlist with wildcards, or block all | Unrestricted, or limited to listed hosts plus optional package registries and MCP servers | Open internet, no provider-side allowlist |
| Your own infrastructure | Deploy to VPC on AWS, GCP or Azure (Enterprise) | Self-hosted sandboxes run tools on your own workers while Anthropic keeps the orchestration | No; runs only in boat's EU data centers (Germany, Finland, France) |
Every feature Battleships tracks (43)
| Feature | Runloop | Claude Managed Agents | boat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full VM (own kernel) | Yes | No | Yes |
| Docker inside | Yes | Not published | Yes |
| Nested virtualization | No | No | Yes |
| Root | Yes | Not published | Yes |
| Systemd | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Desktop GUI | Yes | No | Yes |
| Browser | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Computer-use API | Yes | 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 | 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 | Yes | No | 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 | Yes | No | No |
| Self-hosting | No | Yes | No |
| BYOC | Yes | Yes | No |
| Open source | No | No | No |
| Scoped API keys | Yes | Not published | Yes |
| Spend limits | Not published | Yes | Yes |
| Usage per sandbox (API) | No | Yes | Yes |
| Audit logs | Not published | Not published | No |
| SSO | Yes | Yes | No |
| SOC 2 | Yes | Yes | No |
| HIPAA | Not published | No | No |
| EU data residency | No | No | Yes |
| Zero data retention | Not published | No | Yes |
Performance
On the hpc-sandbox-benchmarks Node.js build-and-test loop at 4 vCPU / 8 GB (run 36498291449, 2026-09-29), boat scored 26.69 runs a second and Runloop 8.29, about 3.2 times apart. Claude Managed Agents has no comparable measurement: it was not in the run, and Anthropic does not publish how many vCPUs a sandbox gets. The test measures CPU work only, not start time or network speed.
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 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 | Runloop, 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 | $113 · Basic | $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 | $429 · Basic | $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 | $5,268 · Basic | $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 | $1,441 · Basic | $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 | $3,184 · Basic | $796 · Claude API (pay-as-you-go, usage tiers) · with limits | $2,000 · $2000/mo · with limits |
Runloop: Runloop bills per second for the CPU and memory you allocate while a devbox is starting, running, suspending or resuming, and bills its disk for the devbox's whole life. Basic has no plan fee; Pro adds $250 a month that is not usage credit and unlocks suspend and resume.
Claude Managed Agents: Managed Agents bills model tokens at API list rates plus a flat session runtime fee, measured to the millisecond only while the session is running, including time spent waiting on the model. The tables show runtime only; tokens come on top and usually cost more than the runtime.
Claude Managed Agents: Plans start at $20 a month, and the whole fee is usage credit, billed per second while a sandbox runs. A stopped sandbox costs nothing and keeps its disk; model tokens for the built-in agents go to your model provider.
Limits in those scenarios
Runloop's fixed lifetime defaults to 1 hour and tops out at 48 hours unless an idle policy replaces it, its disk tops out at 64 GiB, and it publishes no egress price or concurrency cap for paid plans. A Managed Agents sandbox has up to 8 GB of memory and 10 GB of disk, an unpublished vCPU count and Docker only in limited availability, so no scenario here counts as a clean fit; Anthropic publishes 300 creates a minute per organization and usage-tier spend caps, not how many sessions can run at once. boat's limit that bites is start rate: at 1,000 short jobs at once, even the $2,000 plan queues starts above 90 a minute.
| Scenario | Runloop | 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 Runloop when
you want to run your own choice of coding agents on micro-VM devboxes, launch large bursts of short jobs, or need arm64, Dockerfile builds, hostname allowlists or devboxes in your own AWS, GCP or Azure account.
- Any coding agent, on a real VM. Teams that want Claude Code, Codex or Gemini CLI side by side get a micro-VM devbox with Docker-in-Docker for each.
- Large waves of short jobs. Useful for RL rollouts and evals: Runloop starts large bursts without published start limits and sells RL fine-tuning on Enterprise.
- arm64, Dockerfiles and a way in. Runloop builds images from Dockerfiles, offers arm64, and opens an HTTPS tunnel and SSH into each devbox.
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 time costs nothing. Agents that wait a long time between messages pay runtime only while working, and resume on the next message.
- Tools on your own workers. Teams with strict network rules can run every tool call on their own infrastructure while Anthropic runs the agent.
Where boat fits
If you are choosing between renting sandboxes and hiring a hosted agent, boat sits closer to Runloop but gives each agent a fuller machine: a full VM with /dev/kvm, a disk that is saved every minute on every plan, and ports you can open. It also runs Claude Code, Codex and five other agents that you drive from outside, so you are not tied to one harness.
A full machine with /dev/kvm
Runloop documents Docker-in-Docker but not nested virtualization, and a Managed Agents container has up to 8 GB of memory with Docker in limited availability. An Android emulator or a VM will not start on either; on boat they run inside the sandbox.
Files that stay
A Runloop devbox is gone once it shuts down, unless you pay for Pro suspend or write snapshot code. Managed Agents drops sandbox state 30 days after creation. boat saves the disk every minute and on stop, on every plan.
Open what the agent builds
Managed Agents has no inbound ports or SSH, and Runloop gives one HTTPS tunnel with no public IP or raw TCP. On boat, a dev server or database is reachable on HTTPS URLs for up to 50 ports, raw TCP and SSH.
Use boat when your agents need a real machine for hours: Docker, emulators, a desktop and browser, ports you can open, a disk that lasts, CPUs about three times faster than Runloop's, and the choice of Claude Code, Codex or other agents. Compare it one to one: boat vs Runloop and boat vs Claude Managed Agents.
Questions people ask
Is Runloop cheaper than Claude Managed Agents?
For runtime alone, no. One coding agent on workdays is $113 a month on Runloop and $13 on Managed Agents, and 50 agents in parallel are $5,268 against $634. But Managed Agents adds model tokens on top, and its small container is not a clean fit for those scenarios.
Which is faster, Runloop or Claude Managed Agents?
Only Runloop was measured: 8.29 runs a second on the Node.js build-and-test loop at 4 vCPU / 8 GB, where boat scored 26.69. Anthropic does not publish the vCPU count of a Managed Agents sandbox, and much of a session's time is spent waiting on the model.
Can Runloop or Claude Managed Agents run Docker?
Runloop runs Docker as root on its Docker-in-Docker blueprints. Managed Agents lists Docker only as limited availability. boat runs Docker with root and systemd in every sandbox, plus /dev/kvm for emulators and VMs.
Can I run Claude Code on Runloop or Claude Managed Agents?
On Runloop, yes: Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and others run in a devbox, driven through Axons. Managed Agents runs only Anthropic's own harness with Claude models. boat has Claude Code, Codex and five other agents preinstalled.
Can I open a web app my agent built?
On Runloop, yes, through one HTTPS tunnel per devbox. A Managed Agents sandbox has no inbound ports or SSH. boat gives each sandbox HTTPS URLs on up to 50 ports, raw TCP and SSH.
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