balenaEngine vs gVisor
balenaEngine
balena.iogVisor
gvisor.devSide by side
| Figure | balenaEngine | gVisor |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 0 | 1 |
| Spec score · Container Engines | 7.3 (#20) | 8.3 (#6) |
| Purpose | balenaEngine is a container engine purpose-built for embedded and IoT use cases, based on Moby Project technology from Docker. | gVisor is an open-source Linux-compatible sandbox and application kernel that isolates containers from the host operating system. |
Plans
In their own words
balenaEngine
balenaEngine has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.
gVisor
gVisor is a free, open-source Linux-compatible sandbox and application kernel for running containers while isolating the host from untrusted code. It is intended for workloads such as user-uploaded, LLM-generated, and third-party code. Instead of passing sandboxed applications’ system calls directly to the host, its Sentry handles them; a Gofer process mediates filesystem access. The project describes a least-privilege design with a restrictive system call filter. It documents use with Docker, Kubernetes, containerd, and OCI runtimes, including Kubernetes configurations using GKE Sandbox, Minikube, or containerd with the gVisor shim. gVisor can stream application trace points to an external threat detection engine such as Falco, and can checkpoint and restore containers. Most CUDA applications can run unmodified in the sandbox with selected NVIDIA driver versions, but GPU support is restricted to certain models, drivers, capabilities, device files, ioctl calls, and platforms. Installation requires Linux 5.6 or later on x86_64 or ARM64. Compatibility is best-effort, and some applications may not work because not every system call, /proc file, or /sys file is implemented. Hardware side-channel protection is generally not provided.