E2B
Hacker ApprovedRanked 2 of 12 cloud sandboxes by recommenders
Hosted sandboxes for running AI agent code, with snapshots, networking and integrations. Critics mention platform lock-in and a 24-hour session cap.
Hosted sandboxes for running AI agent code, with snapshots, networking and integrations. Critics mention platform lock-in and a 24-hour session cap.
27 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 23
- criticize it
- 4
- approval share
- 85%
Recommended in 9 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 23 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 5.8 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 9 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Strong security via hardware virtualization
“I started with e2b because it has stronger security guarantees”
Comment from 7 May 2026 in “Show HN: I built an open source background agent inspired by Ramp Inspect” “E2B/Vercel are both great hardware virtualized sandboxes”
Comment from 6 Apr 2026 in “Launch HN: Freestyle: Sandboxes for AI Coding Agents” “e2b does firecracker and it's noticeably snappier”
Comment from 3 Jan 2026 in “Show HN: Boxed – Sovereign exec engine for AI agents (Vercel Sandbox inspired)” Fast startup and snappy performance
“We've had positive early results on latency, but yeah … too early to tell where we end up on cost.”
Comment from 3 Apr 2026 in “We replaced RAG with a virtual filesystem for our AI documentation assistant” “e2b does firecracker and it's noticeably snappier”
Comment from 3 Jan 2026 in “Show HN: Boxed – Sovereign exec engine for AI agents (Vercel Sandbox inspired)” “we spin up Sandboxes around 50-200ms at E2B”
Comment from 3 Feb 2026 in “Deno Sandbox” Snapshots, volumes, networking, integrations
“E2B is up the stack and ships everything around VM like snapshots, networking, integrations.”
Comment from 26 Jun 2026 in “Run isolated sandboxes with full lifecycle control: AWS introduces MicroVMs” “fortunately it supports volume, so we just create volumes for personal skills”
Comment from 3 May 2026 in “The agent harness belongs outside the sandbox” Open source standard, used in production
“has quickly become the open source standard for agentic workflow sandboxes”
Comment from 1 May 2026 in “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (May 2026)” “Factory, Nvidia, Perplexity and Manus are using E2B in production”
Comment from 3 Feb 2026 in “Deno Sandbox”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Unclear value over hosted VMs
“Daytona and E2B are both great "sandbox" providers but don't really feel like VMs”
Comment from 6 Apr 2026 in “Launch HN: Freestyle: Sandboxes for AI Coding Agents” “I'm still not sure about the value they add on top of Cloud hosted VMs”
Comment from 4 Feb 2026 in “Deno Sandbox” Platform lock-in and session limits
“Cloud sandboxes (E2B, Modal, etc.) work, but you're locked into their platform with limited customization”
Comment from 13 Dec 2025 in “BoxLite Love AI agent – SQLite for VMs: embeddable AI agent sandboxing” “Self-hosted, no session limits, unlike E2B's 24-hour cap”
Comment from 20 Jan 2026 in “Run untrusted code in VMs on Mac/Linux – 1-2ms warm start, domain filtering”
Other cloud sandboxes people recommend
The four most recommended other cloud sandboxes, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sprites | 58 | 30 | 66% | 11 | 3 mo4 owners | — |
| E2BThis page | 23 | 4 | 85% | 9 | — | Approved |
| Deno Sandbox | 21 | 9 | 70% | 4 | — | Approved |
| Freestyle Sandboxes | 20 | 8 | 71% | 2 | — | — |
| Agent37 | 15 | 2 | 88% | 3 | — | — |
What people said
25 of the 32 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“they had everything we needed at the time”
“struggled with e2b/daytona too”
“E2B is up the stack and ships everything around VM like snapshots, networking, integrations.”
“I started with e2b because it has stronger security guarantees”
“fortunately it supports volume, so we just create volumes for personal skills”
“has quickly become the open source standard for agentic workflow sandboxes”
“Every platform mentioned in these comments like E2B, Daytona, Fly Sprites, Sandflare appears Linux-native”
“Daytona and E2B are both great "sandbox" providers but don't really feel like VMs”
“E2B/Vercel are both great hardware virtualized sandboxes”
“We've had positive early results on latency, but yeah … too early to tell where we end up on cost.”
“you'd still probably want a dedicated VM like on E2B”
“e2b has its use case, at least for now”
“I'm still not sure about the value they add on top of Cloud hosted VMs”
“Factory, Nvidia, Perplexity and Manus are using E2B in production”
“This is what I like to see!”
“we offer secure cloud VMs that scale up to 100k concurrent instances or more”
“we spin up Sandboxes around 50-200ms at E2B”
“we have 100% open-source Sandboxes at E2B”
“We run Remotion preview renders in isolated environments.”
“Self-hosted, no session limits, unlike E2B's 24-hour cap”
“easy to start, no infrastructure needed”
“e2b does firecracker and it's noticeably snappier”
“Thank you for sharing! This is awesome.”
“Cloud sandboxes (E2B, Modal, etc.) work, but you're locked into their platform with limited customization”
“We use e2b.dev, but Modal is great too”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.