Northflank vs Sandlock

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.

Sandlock is a Linux process sandbox for confining untrusted code with policies enforced by the kernel. It uses Landlock, seccomp-bpf, and seccomp user notification to control filesystem access, network activity, system calls, and resource use. Policies can deny network egress by default, apply HTTP method, host, and path rules, stage writes through copy-on-write, and set resource limits. A supervisor can attach credentials through a proxy after an HTTP access check, keeping the secret value out of the sandboxed workload. Interfaces include a CLI, Python SDK, Rust API, Go SDK, OCI runtime, and MCP server. The OCI runtime works with containerd, CRI-O, and Kubernetes, while the remote MCP API can connect to Claude Desktop, Cursor, or another MCP client. Sandlock runs as an ordinary user without root, a container runtime, or a hypervisor. Linux 6.12 or later supports the full protection set by default; older kernels require explicit waivers for missing protections. It shares the host kernel, excluding kernel vulnerabilities and hardware side channels from its guarantees.