# E2B vs Modal Sandboxes

E2B is a sandbox company; Modal is a serverless GPU cloud with sandboxes as one product. Modal's own July 2025 roundup compares them.

Facts checked 17 October 2026. Prices and limits move. Read the citations.

Neither product is ours. Rush is, and it gets one paragraph below. Every cell is from the vendor's own pages.

**The short answer.** Pick E2B for agent sandboxes with pause and resume and a self-hostable runtime. Pick Modal when the same platform should run GPUs, RL rollouts and inference.

## The useful distinction

E2B: Firecracker microVM sandboxes driven from an SDK. Your agent runs code there; the loop, the git steps and the pull request are your code. Rush itself runs on E2B.

Modal Sandboxes: Programmable gVisor containers, or a VM runtime, on Modal's serverless cloud, for agent code, RL rollouts and untrusted code, with snapshots, egress rules and GPUs.

## Buyer questions

| Question | E2B | Modal Sandboxes |
| --- | --- | --- |
| What runs | None built in. You bring the agent; E2B ships a prebuilt claude template and guides for Codex and OpenCode. | None built in. You bring the agent and call Sandbox.create from Python. |
| Isolation | Firecracker microVMs with dedicated kernels. A paused sandbox keeps its filesystem and memory, with no automatic deletion. | gVisor by default, or a VM runtime with its own kernel. Default lifetime is 5 minutes and the timeout goes up to 24 hours; past that you restore from a filesystem snapshot. |
| Result and pull request | Left to you. E2B's Claude Code guide clones with your token, runs the agent and reads git diff; pushing and opening the pull request is your code. | Left to you. The sandbox guide has no git or pull request feature. |
| MCP | An MCP gateway inside the sandbox reaches 200+ servers from Docker's catalog, or servers you run yourself. | Not mentioned on Modal's sandbox guide. |
| Team | An SDK for your own product. No shared task view or Slack and Linear surface on the pages we read. | Workspaces, environments, service users, user groups and role-based access control. |
| Starting price | Hobby $0 with a one-time $100 credit; Pro $150 / month plus usage | Starter $0 + compute with $30 / month credit; Team $250 / month + compute |
| Where it taps out | Sessions end at 1 hour on Hobby and 24 hours on Pro unless paused. Sandboxes reach the open internet by default. No result or pull request layer. Pro has a $150 monthly fee before usage. | 5-minute default lifetime and a 24-hour cap per sandbox. Sandbox CPU costs about three times a Modal function's. GPU sandboxes need the gVisor runtime. |

## When each side wins

### E2B wins when

- You want raw SDK control over each sandbox, for an agent you wrote or for work that is not an agent at all.
- You must self-host: the runtime is Apache-2.0, runs on one KVM host or ships as Terraform for AWS, GCP and Azure, and E2B also offers BYOC.
- You want published per-second rates for CPU and RAM and up to 1,100 concurrent sandboxes on its top published tier.

### Modal Sandboxes wins when

- You need GPUs inside the sandbox, billed per second.
- You fan out at RL scale: Modal advertises 1M+ sandboxes in under a minute.
- You want CIDR and domain egress allowlists and one platform for inference, training and sandboxes.

## Where Rush sits

If the sandbox exists to run a coding agent on a repository, Rush is that loop already built, on E2B microVMs.

## Skip Rush if

- Rush runs three agents: Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode. It does not host an agent you wrote yourself.
- Repositories come through the Rush GitHub App. A GitLab or Bitbucket repository cannot be a run's repository yet.
- There is no self-hosted or customer-VPC deployment, and we do not publish a compliance report today.
- Compute is metered. Free includes 5 agent-hours a month and Pro 40, each with a weekly ceiling.
- You review the pull request. Rush does not merge for you.

## Questions people actually ask

### Is E2B cheaper than Modal Sandboxes?

List prices, read off each vendor's pricing page on 17 October 2026. E2B: Hobby $0 with a one-time $100 credit; Pro $150 / month plus usage. Modal Sandboxes: Starter $0 + compute with $30 / month credit; Team $250 / month + compute. The units differ, so price the job you run, not the plan.

### Where does Rush fit next to E2B and Modal Sandboxes?

If the sandbox exists to run a coding agent on a repository, Rush is that loop already built, on E2B microVMs.

## Keep reading

- [Rush vs E2B](https://getrush.ai/compare/rush-vs-e2b.md)
- [Rush vs Modal Sandboxes](https://getrush.ai/compare/rush-vs-modal.md)
- [E2B alternatives](https://getrush.ai/compare/e2b-alternatives.md)
- [Modal Sandboxes alternatives](https://getrush.ai/compare/modal-alternatives.md)

## Sources

1. E2B, "E2B Pricing", retrieved 2026-10-17. https://e2b.dev/pricing
2. E2B, "E2B | The Enterprise AI Agent Cloud", retrieved 2026-10-17. https://e2b.dev/
3. E2B, "Sandbox persistence", retrieved 2026-10-17. https://docs.e2b.dev/sandbox/persistence
4. E2B, "Claude Code - E2B Docs", retrieved 2026-10-17. https://docs.e2b.dev/agents/claude-code
5. E2B, "Coding Agents - E2B Docs", retrieved 2026-10-17. https://docs.e2b.dev/use-cases/coding-agents
6. E2B, "Available servers - E2B Docs", retrieved 2026-10-17. https://docs.e2b.dev/mcp-gateway/available-servers
7. E2B, "e2b-dev/infra (GitHub README)", retrieved 2026-10-17. https://github.com/e2b-dev/infra
8. Modal, "Pricing: Pay per second for GPUs and CPUs | Modal", retrieved 2026-10-17. https://modal.com/pricing
9. Modal, "Sandboxes (Modal Docs)", retrieved 2026-10-17. https://modal.com/docs/guide/sandboxes
10. Modal, "Sandboxes: Isolated environments for reinforcement learning and AI agents | Modal", retrieved 2026-10-17. https://modal.com/products/sandboxes
11. Modal, "Networking and security | Modal Docs", retrieved 2026-10-17. https://modal.com/docs/guide/sandbox-networking
12. Modal, "Top AI Code Sandbox Products in 2025", published 2025-07-17. https://modal.com/blog/top-code-agent-sandbox-products
13. Rush, "Rush product requirements", retrieved 2026-09-15. https://getrush.ai/cloud
14. Rush, "Rush pricing (live contract on getrush.ai)", retrieved 2026-09-15. https://getrush.ai/pricing
15. Rush, "Isolation, plainly", retrieved 2026-10-17. https://getrush.ai/docs/concepts/isolation
16. Rush, "Results and proof", retrieved 2026-10-17. https://getrush.ai/docs/concepts/results-and-proof
17. Rush, "Usage and billing", retrieved 2026-10-17. https://getrush.ai/docs/concepts/usage-and-billing
18. Rush, "Rush MCP server", retrieved 2026-10-17. https://getrush.ai/docs/concepts/mcp-server
19. Rush, "Automations", retrieved 2026-10-17. https://getrush.ai/docs/concepts/automations