Daytona vs E2B vs Modal: Which Sandbox Should Run Your Coding Agent's Generated Code?

The short answer

Pick E2B by default: it's the only one of the three still shipping as open source with a repo that's actually being worked on, its pricing is simple usage-based metering with no platform fee at the entry tier, and it does one thing — ephemeral code-execution sandboxes — without the surface area of a broader compute platform. Pick Daytona if you need sandboxes that persist for days rather than hours, GPU sandboxes, or full desktop (Linux/macOS/Windows) environments your agent can drive with a mouse — but go in knowing the open-source repo it built its reputation on no longer carries any code. Pick Modal if your agent workloads already run on Modal for inference or training and you want sandboxes on the same bill, or if you need to burst to extreme concurrency: Modal has demonstrated 1 million concurrent sandboxes created in under a minute.

Daytona vs E2B vs Modal

Prices and repo status checked against each vendor's pricing page and the GitHub API on 2026-10-16.

Daytona built its name on an open-source repo that's now a README

Daytona's GitHub organization still shows daytonaio/daytona sitting at 71,537 stars — the kind of number that makes a sandbox provider look like the open-source default. The repo is now archived, carries no detected license, and was last pushed on 2026-07-24. Pulling the repo's own file listing shows why: the default branch today contains only a README.md and a folder of logo images. The README explains the rest:

"This repository is no longer maintained. As of June 2026, Daytona's core development has moved to a private codebase. This repository will receive no further updates, fixes, or releases."

The same README still opens by calling Daytona "our open-source platform" — a description that no longer matches the code behind it. None of this breaks the product: Daytona's API, SDKs, and pricing all work as advertised, and the company still points customers to github.com/daytona for "Daytona resources." But if you were choosing Daytona because it was the open-source option, that reason is gone. A team that needs to audit, fork, or self-host the actual sandbox runtime can no longer do that here.

Where Daytona wins

Daytona is the most feature-complete of the three for anything beyond a short-lived code-execution call. Sandboxes are stateful by design and "run indefinitely," against E2B's hard caps of 1 hour (Hobby) or 24 hours (Pro) per session. Daytona also offers GPU sandboxes (Nvidia B300 down to RTX 4090, priced preemptible or on-demand) and full desktop environments — Linux, macOS, and Windows instances an agent can control like a human would — neither of which E2B offers at all; E2B's pricing page states plainly that "Sandboxes are CPU-only." Daytona also ships SDKs in five languages (Python, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, Java) against E2B's Python and JavaScript/TypeScript, and offers customer-managed compute (BYOC) with HIPAA, SOC 2, and GDPR compliance built in for regulated buyers. Harrison Chase, CEO and founder of LangChain, is quoted on Daytona's homepage describing a sandboxing limitation his team hit while building their own coding agent: "Daytona jumped in, contributed a working PR within hours, and fully unblocked us."

Where E2B wins

E2B is the only one of the three where the code you'd be trusting to isolate untrusted output is still public, licensed (Apache-2.0), and actively worked on — its repo was pushed two days before this was checked. Its pricing is also the most transparent: published per-second rates ($0.000014/vCPU-second, $0.0000045/GiB-second), a free Hobby tier with no credit card, and a clear concurrency ladder (20 sandboxes on Hobby, up to 1,100 on paid concurrency add-ons) rather than a "contact sales" wall. For a team that just needs to run agent-generated code safely — not run desktops, not train models — E2B is the narrowest, least to configure, and the one you can actually read the source of before you trust it with untrusted output.

Where Modal wins

Modal's edge is scale and proximity to GPU compute it already sells. Its July 2026 engineering writeup on rebuilding its sandbox scheduler is concrete about what that buys: no central coordinator in the sandbox-creation path, scheduling that stays fast independent of load, and a demonstrated 1 million concurrent sandboxes created in under a minute during testing. That matters specifically for reinforcement-learning rollouts, where a training run can need hundreds of thousands of sandboxes spun up in a burst — a workload neither Daytona nor E2B markets toward as explicitly. If your coding agent's sandboxes sit next to GPU inference or fine-tuning jobs you're already running on Modal, sandboxes land on the same bill and the same modal.Sandbox.create() API, with no second vendor to integrate.

Pricing at a realistic volume

Daytona and E2B charge identical raw compute rates — $0.0504 per vCPU-hour and $0.0162 per GiB-hour — so a default 2 vCPU / 4 GiB sandbox costs $0.1656/hour on either one. Modal's sandbox compute is priced separately from its general-purpose compute, at $0.1419 per physical core-hour (one core equals 2 vCPUs) and $0.0240 per GiB-hour — about 3x Modal's own per-second rate for CPU and memory on its standard compute products. A same-sized sandbox on Modal works out to $0.2379/hour, roughly 44% more than Daytona or E2B.

Run that sandbox for 1,000 hours in a month — a reasonable load for a team with dozens of developers triggering agent runs daily — and the totals diverge further once plan fees are added. E2B's usage comes to $165.60, but production use (more than 20 concurrent sandboxes, or sessions past 1 hour) requires the $150/month Pro plan, bringing the total to about $315.60. Daytona's pay-as-you-go model has no mandatory plan fee, so the same load is $165.60 before its $200 signup credit is applied. Modal's usage comes to $237.90; its Starter plan has no fee either, and nets against $30/month in recurring free compute, landing around $207.90 — cheaper than E2B once E2B needs its Pro plan, but still above Daytona.

None of the three publish GPU sandbox rates that are directly comparable: Daytona prices GPUs by the hour per card, E2B doesn't offer GPU sandboxes at all, and Modal bills GPU time inside a sandbox at its standard per-second platform rates rather than a sandbox-specific price.