microsandbox vs Northflank
microsandbox
microsandbox.dev
Northflank
northflank.comSide by side
| Figure | microsandbox | Northflank |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $49/mo | $2.70/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 4 | 6 |
| Spec score · Sandbox Software | 8.2 (#8) | 8.9 (#6) |
| Support | The product FAQ directs users with questions to its Discord community. | Basic email support is included in all plans, while premium support offers dedicated Slack channels, video calls, faster response times, and service-level agreements with uptime guarantees. |
| What it does | Microsandbox is a local-first microVM runtime for running untrusted workloads, including AI agents, user code, plugins, CI jobs, scrapers, and automation. | Northflank is a developer platform for building, deploying and operating services, databases, jobs and GPU workloads on managed or customer-owned infrastructure. |
Plans
microsandbox
- FreeFree
- Builder$49 a month
- Teams$299 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
Northflank
- Pay-as-you-goFree
- SandboxFree
- nf-compute-10$2.70 a month
- nf-compute-50$12 a month
- nf-compute-100-2$24 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
In their own words
microsandbox
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.
Northflank
Northflank is a developer platform for building and running applications made up of microservices, databases, background jobs, and scheduled tasks. It handles container builds, networking, and orchestration, and offers managed Kubernetes across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. Deployments can use Northflank infrastructure, cloud accounts from AWS, GCP, Azure, Oracle, or CoreWeave, or imported Kubernetes clusters, including bare-metal and on-premises environments. Git integrations include hosted and self-hosted services; the platform also supports container registries and observability tools. Teams can use its UI, CLI, REST API, GitOps, reusable templates, pipelines, and preview environments. Northflank says secrets and files are encrypted at rest with AES-256, secrets are injected at runtime, and managed-cloud workloads use isolation controls. It states that it is SOC 2 Type 2 and HIPAA compliant; ISO 27001/27018 is listed as unavailable. The free Sandbox includes two services, one database, and two cron jobs with always-on compute. A payment method is required before creating resources, including on the free plan. Basic email support is included in all plans.