Firejail vs microsandbox

Firejail is a free, self-hosted Linux sandboxing program for restricting untrusted applications, servers, graphical programs, and login sessions. It uses Linux namespaces and seccomp-bpf so sandboxed processes receive private views of network, process, and mount tables. The software runs on Linux computers with a 3.x kernel or newer. Security controls include protocol filtering, noroot user namespaces, Linux capabilities, D-BUS filtering, and optional AppArmor or SELinux support. Mandatory Access Control can block more than 1,000 desktop applications from passwords, encryption keys, and private data, with more than 1,000 profiles available in /etc/firejail. Firejail can create an isolated TCP/IP stack with routing, firewall, and interfaces, and nettrace can inspect traffic. AppImage packages are supported. Firetools adds a Qt5 graphical launcher, tray integration, editing, management, and statistics; FDNS provides DNS-over-HTTPS through non-logging providers. Running sudo firecfg integrates application menus and file-manager launches. The project targets home users and Linux beginners rather than enterprise customers.

Microsandbox runs untrusted workloads inside microVMs, each with its own Linux kernel, filesystem, and network boundary rather than sharing the host kernel. It can run AI agents, user code, plugins, CI jobs, scrapers, and automation. The local runtime starts on a user's machine without a daemon, root service, or account; it can also run on personal servers or clusters, and its cloud platform can be deployed in the user's infrastructure. Microsandbox offers SDKs for TypeScript, Rust, Python, Go, and Ruby, plus a CLI and MCP workflows, and accepts OCI images from container registries. By default, sandboxes can reach the public internet, while private, host-local, link-local, and metadata destinations are blocked; egress can be allowlisted or disabled. The runtime is open source under Apache 2.0. The Free plan is $0 per month, while paid plans start at $49 per month. Microsandbox Cloud is in private beta and requires an access request.