Agentic Index
boxd vs Daytona (2026)
boxd last verified ·Daytona last verified
Both give agents persistent sandboxes billed by the second, and they start from different machines. boxd runs every agent on a KVM microVM that keeps its memory and running processes between sessions, forks a running machine with its memory in under 200ms and wakes a hibernated machine on the next request, and it comes with coding agents, 128 integrations whose credentials stay outside the machine and a live desktop with a browser the agent drives. That verdict is the Agentic Index coverage score, graded from each vendor's own published materials.
Daytona creates sandboxes in under 90 milliseconds as Linux containers by default, with Linux VM, Windows and GPU sandboxes, a Computer Use API for Linux and Windows desktops, webhooks, an audit log and OpenTelemetry tracing of every SDK call. boxd runs in Frankfurt or New York, in a customer's cloud on its Scale plan or self hosted free up to 16 vCPUs, while Daytona runs in shared US and EU regions or on the customer's own runner nodes. Choose boxd when agents need a long lived machine with integrations and forks that keep memory, and Daytona when you need Windows or GPU sandboxes, tracing and team controls today.
This comparison is published by Agentic Index, an independent agentic AI vendor research platform. boxd and Daytona are each graded against the same 14 capability Agentic Index taxonomy, from the vendor's own public materials under the Agentic Index verification standard, alongside 1,165 researched vendors. No vendor pays for placement and no vendor has reviewed this page. How this evidence is graded
Choose boxd if
- Forks should copy a running machine with its memory and processes, so every branch or rollout starts from the same warm state.
- Agents should act in GitHub, Linear, Slack or Salesforce through 128 integrations whose credentials never enter the machine.
- Automations written in TypeScript should run on schedules and integration events from the machine itself.
- A person should watch an agent's browser on a live desktop and step in without stopping the session.
- You want to self host the same release on AWS, Google Cloud or any KVM host, free up to 16 vCPUs.
Choose Daytona if
- Agents need Windows or GPU sandboxes, or macOS through Daytona's use.computer service.
- Every SDK call and sandbox action should be traced to your own OpenTelemetry collector.
- Webhooks should notify your systems when sandboxes, snapshots or volumes change.
- Teams need granular permissions, an audit log and single sign on through OpenID Connect providers.
- You want $200 of free compute without a card and dollar pricing at about five cents per vCPU hour.
| Feature | b boxd |
D Daytona |
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| Action & orchestration | ||
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Integrations & Tool Calling Ability to connect agents to real systems through native integrations, OAuth-authenticated actions, custom tools, APIs, webhooks, or MCP-compatible tools. |
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boxdIntegrations & Tool Calling Agents on a machine act in outside systems through 128 integrations, including GitHub, Linear, Slack, Notion, Jira, Salesforce, HubSpot, Stripe and Zendesk, each with typed tools such as creating an issue or sending a message. A person connects an account once through the provider's consent screen, personally or as a shared connection for the whole organization, and the platform then makes each call on the machine's behalf, so the credential never enters the machine. The in machine run CLI and the @boxd/run SDK call these tools, and scripts reach any other API, database or cloud account with ordinary libraries. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/guides/integrations/connectionsread 2026-11-05 |
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DaytonaIntegrations & Tool Calling An agent in a Daytona sandbox reaches outside systems through what runs inside it. Git operations clone and push repositories, secrets hold credentials and external storage can be mounted. Firewall allow lists decide which hosts the agent may reach. Daytona has no catalog of connectors, OAuth actions or tool gateway of its own. The tools are the customer's code. Sourcedaytona.io/docs/llms.txtread 2026-09-22 |
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Workflow Orchestration Ability to sequence, branch, retry, route, and combine deterministic workflow nodes with autonomous agent steps. |
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boxdWorkflow Orchestration Background jobs give automations a managed lifecycle. A script that registers a schedule or trigger runs as a job that survives reboots, waits for a missing connection instead of failing, and restarts with exponential backoff for up to five attempts before it is marked failed. boxd's fan out pattern has a coordinator create one machine per worker, run a coding agent headless in each and let a lead agent merge the reports, and a fork brings a machine's jobs along paused so nothing runs twice. The sequencing, branching and hand offs in that pattern are code the customer writes against the SDK, and boxd has no workflow graph, step model or multi agent runtime of its own. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/guides/automations/jobsread 2026-11-05 |
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DaytonaWorkflow Orchestration The platform manages sandboxes. It creates and resizes them, applies lifecycle rules and runs warm pools and fleet scaling. It does not sequence, branch, retry or route an agent's steps. In Daytona's guides, agents built in LangGraph, the OpenAI Agents SDK and other frameworks do that, and Daytona has no workflow logic that mixes fixed steps with agent steps. Sourcedaytona.io/docs/en/sandboxesread 2026-09-22 |
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Triggers & Channel Coverage How agents wake up and where they work: schedules, webhooks, message events, CRM events, inbox events, chat, email, voice, and collaboration tools. |
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boxdTriggers & Channel Coverage Work reaches a machine on schedules, events and inbound requests. An automation registers durations or cron expressions with every() and subscribes to integration events with .on(), such as a new Linear issue or a pull request through the boxd GitHub App, and 36 integrations emit triggers. The platform holds the next due time and wakes a hibernated machine shortly before it, holds events that arrive while a machine wakes for up to 15 minutes, and fires a missed cron slot once on wake. A hibernated machine also wakes on the next HTTPS request, so an agent served from it answers webhooks at its own address. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/guides/automations/scriptsread 2026-11-05 |
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DaytonaTriggers & Channel Coverage Events go outward. Webhooks notify the customer's endpoint when sandboxes are created or change state and when snapshots and volumes change. Automated lifecycle rules stop, pause, archive or delete idle sandboxes. An agent's work starts only when the customer's code starts it. There is no schedule, and a stopped sandbox does not wake on an inbound request. Sourcedaytona.io/docs/en/webhooksread 2026-09-22 |
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| Knowledge & context | ||
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Knowledge Grounding & RAG Ability to ground agent behavior in company data through document ingestion, retrieval, external knowledge APIs, semantic search, or RAG layers. |
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boxdKnowledge Grounding & RAG No retrieval index, vector store or knowledge base over the customer's content comes with the platform. Files on a machine's disk, standalone disks that outlive a machine and data sets saved into a snapshot are storage the agent's code reads, not an index a query returns. Tools such as Notion, Confluence or Google Drive are searched through their own integrations, and any grounding layer is something the customer installs on the machine. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/llms.txtread 2026-11-05 |
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DaytonaKnowledge Grounding & RAG The agent's code runs on Daytona, but there is no retrieval structure over the customer's content. Volumes and mounted external storage hold files the agent's code reads, and there is no index to query. The language server in a sandbox serves code intelligence for the files there. Nothing in Daytona indexes, refreshes or sets permissions on the customer's sources. Sourcedaytona.io/docs/llms.txtread 2026-09-22 |
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Memory & State Persistence Ability to persist context across a run, conversation, workflow, user, team, or longer-term memory layer. |
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boxdMemory & State Persistence Machines keep their working state between sessions. A machine on standby resumes in under a millisecond and a hibernated one wakes with its memory and processes intact, and coding agent sessions live on the persistent disk, so a job delegated in the morning can be resumed interactively later. Forks, checkpoints and snapshots copy or rewind that state. Automations also get object(name), a named JSON store written on every assignment and restored on the next run, meant for cursors, dedup sets and counters. All of it is machine and script state the developer manages, with no memory layer of stated scope and lifetime that a buyer can review, edit or delete as memory. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/guides/automations/scriptsread 2026-11-05 |
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DaytonaMemory & State Persistence Persistence is on by default at three layers. The filesystem survives stop, start and archive. On VM sandboxes, memory (running processes and loaded state) survives pause and resume and hot snapshots. Volumes and mounted external storage outlive any one sandbox. Sandboxes can also be forked, and the agent's code reads the restored state to carry on. Paused process state belongs to the machine, so the customer can resume or delete it but cannot review or edit it. There is no separate memory layer that sets what an agent keeps or for how long. Sourcedaytona.io/docs/en/persistenceread 2026-09-22 |
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| Control & trust | ||
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Human Oversight & Guardrails Approval steps, consent checkpoints, escalation rules, structured guardrails, policy constraints, and pause/resume controls. |
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boxdHuman Oversight & Guardrails A person can step into an agent's work while it runs. Every machine has a live desktop in the browser where its owner watches the agent's browser, takes over the keyboard to enter a password, solve a captcha or fix a form, and hands control back without stopping the agent. The preinstalled coding agents are told to share that desktop link whenever they need someone, so a login or approval happens in the browser the agent already opened. There is no approval gate, pause primitive or policy that holds an agent's action until a person reviews it. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/guides/desktopread 2026-11-05 |
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DaytonaHuman Oversight & Guardrails Work in a sandbox has no approval step, consent checkpoint or escalation to a person. VNC, a web terminal and SSH let a person watch a sandbox and step in by hand. A firewall on each sandbox (allow lists or block all, with organization tiers that sandbox settings cannot override) restricts what an agent's code can reach. Nothing holds an agent's action for a person to review. Sourcedaytona.io/docs/en/network-limitsread 2026-09-22 |
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Security, Identity & Governance RBAC, SSO, auditability, encryption, least-privilege tool access, compliance posture, and data handling policy. |
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boxdSecurity, Identity & Governance Organizations have three roles. Members use shared machines and create org billed ones, admins also invite and remove members, change roles, set defaults, create teams and revoke org API keys, and the single owner can demote admins. Admin invites need an interactive login, so an API key or a token minted inside a machine cannot send one. People sign in with GitHub or Google, with SAML single sign on offered to enterprise customers on request. A DPA is available, and SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 are both in progress, not held. Each machine is a KVM microVM with its own kernel, and egress allowlists and host bound secrets are enforced on the host, outside the machine. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/guides/organizationsread 2026-11-05 |
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DaytonaSecurity, Identity & Governance Organizations sign in through OpenID Connect providers such as Google Workspace, Microsoft Entra ID and Okta, with provisioning and membership handled at sign in on the Enterprise plan. Collaborative organizations have owner and member roles plus granular assignments by resource, such as SSO Admin and access to the audit log. API keys carry permissions and scopes, with managed child keys. An audit log covers user and system activity, and each sandbox has firewall allow lists or block all. Daytona says it meets HIPAA, SOC 2 and GDPR standards and has a Trust Center, but it names no report type or auditor. Sourcedaytona.io/docs/en/ssoread 2026-09-22 |
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Observability & Auditability Traces, logs, execution histories, metrics, audit events, and debugging detail for production agent behavior. |
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boxdObservability & Auditability Automations are visible and the agent's own steps are not. The console's Automations page lists every background job with its triggers in plain English, the integrations it uses, its state, last run and last error, plus a generated write up and flow diagram for each script, and run logs prints or follows a job's log from inside the machine. Regional uptime and incidents appear on a public status page. A coding agent's prompts, tool calls and outputs are not traced by the platform, and no audit trail of member actions is offered. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/guides/automations/jobsread 2026-11-05 |
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DaytonaObservability & Auditability Each step an agent takes in the sandbox is recorded. SDK tracing instruments every Daytona API operation and SDK call from the customer's application, such as each command run, file written or process started. Sandbox telemetry collects traces, logs and metrics from inside the sandbox. Both export over OpenTelemetry to the customer's own collector, and Daytona keeps sandbox telemetry for three days. A separate audit log records user and system activity with the user, action and time, and logs can be streamed. The model's reasoning runs outside Daytona. Audit export is not available yet, and Daytona says it is coming soon. Sourcedaytona.io/docs/en/observability/otel-collectionread 2026-09-22 |
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Deployment & Data Residency Deployment modes and options, including SaaS, dedicated cloud, VPC, on-prem, hybrid, local runtime, and self-hosting. |
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boxdDeployment & Data Residency Each machine runs in Frankfurt or New York, picked per machine from the CLI, console or SDK or set as an organization default, and its disk, memory, snapshots, checkpoints and backups stay in that region on Latitude.sh bare metal. Scale customers can have boxd operate the cluster inside their own cloud account, and the same release self hosts on AWS, Google Cloud or any KVM host, free up to 16 worker vCPUs and licensed above that, with air gapped installs supported. boxd gives conflicting accounts of its US region, with New York live in some places and coming soon with a waitlist in others. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/guides/regionsread 2026-11-05 |
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DaytonaDeployment & Data Residency Sandboxes run in two shared regions, the United States and Europe, chosen per sandbox. Under Bring Your Own Compute, an organization instead creates custom regions and attaches its own runner nodes, with an optional proxy and snapshot manager for each region, for control over data locality and compliance. Daytona's control plane manages them, and BYOC is sold on the Enterprise plan. The platform sold today cannot be self hosted from open source. Core development has moved to a private codebase, and the public github.com/daytonaio/daytona repository gets no further updates. Its last release, v0.190.0, stays public under AGPL 3.0. Sourcedaytona.io/docs/en/bring-your-own-computeread 2026-09-22 |
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| Solution readiness | ||
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Prebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Ready-made workflows, packaged employees, templates, blueprints, industry solutions, and role-specific agents that reduce time-to-value. |
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boxdPrebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Machines arrive with Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode installed and configured through an instructions file that teaches each agent the platform, plus three preinstalled skills covering the in machine CLI, automations and the desktop, and a CLI skill for the laptop. Guides walk through development workspaces, preview environments, CI runners, personal assistants, sandboxes, agentic SaaS, RL environments and agent swarms, and connectors exist for open source tools such as TanStack AI, Pydantic AI, Harbor and Scale AI AgentEnv. These are configured third party agents and recipes a developer builds from, not prebuilt agents of boxd's own. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/use-cases/coding-agentsread 2026-11-05 |
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DaytonaPrebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Ready made starting points for running agents include default sandbox snapshots in several sizes, a Declarative Builder for images and an agent skill for coding agents. More than forty guides run coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Devin, Gemini CLI, OpenClaw, OpenCode), as well as framework agents and reinforcement learning setups, in sandboxes, and a reference implementation runs Cursor's Cloud Agents on self hosted Daytona sandboxes. Developers build from these environments and walkthroughs. There is no browsable catalog of agents a customer can adopt. Sourcedaytona.io/docs/en/agent-skillsread 2026-10-23 |
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| Platform extensibility | ||
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Model Flexibility & Routing Ability to work across multiple foundation models, route tasks to different models, or let buyers bring their own providers and keys. |
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boxdModel Flexibility & Routing The customer decides which agents and models run. Claude Code and Codex use the customer's own subscription, signed in once and served to every private machine in the organization, or an API key stored as a secret, OpenCode signs in on each machine, and any other agent or model that runs on Linux can be installed. boxd adds no model of its own and does not route between providers, and it does not use customer data to train or improve any model. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/use-cases/coding-agentsread 2026-11-05 |
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DaytonaModel Flexibility & Routing The customer chooses the model. Guides run agents on Claude, OpenAI Codex and the Agents SDK, Gemini, Kimi and AWS Kiro, and on open models through OpenCode and other frameworks. GPU sandboxes serve the customer's own LLMs with vLLM or SGLang. Daytona imposes no model, and customers bring their own providers and keys, with guides on setting them up. Sourcedaytona.io/docs/llms.txtread 2026-09-22 |
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APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Composability layer: stable APIs, SDKs, MCP tool consumption/serving, custom tools, and integration into internal systems. |
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boxdAPIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Outside code drives the platform through TypeScript and Python SDKs, a gRPC API whose full api.proto service definition is public for generating stubs in any language, and a CLI that returns JSON from its commands. Each region has its own API endpoint, and organization API keys keep working after the person who created them leaves. The SDKs cover machines, forks, snapshots, checkpoints, disks, egress, secrets, domains, organizations and teams, and a filesystem API reads and writes files inside a machine from code. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/reference/grpc-apiread 2026-11-05 |
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DaytonaAPIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Outside callers reach Daytona through SDKs in five languages (Python, TypeScript, Ruby, Go and Java), a REST API with published OpenAPI specifications, and a CLI. The specifications cover the Daytona API, the Toolbox API inside the sandbox and an Analytics API. An MCP server lets Claude, Cursor and Windsurf manage sandboxes, and an agent skill serves coding agents. Sourcedaytona.io/docs/llms.txtread 2026-09-22 |
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Testing, Debugging & Optimization Testing, debugging, scoring, retries, fallbacks, quality gates, and optimization loops for improving agent workflows before and after deployment. |
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boxdTesting, Debugging & Optimization There are no test cases, scoring or quality gates for an agent's behavior. The platform is where evaluations run, not how they are scored. Forks give every reinforcement learning rollout or benchmark trial a byte identical starting state, Moyai ran 279,577 Harbor benchmark machines on it, and a reproducibility check compares two forks run with the same seed, but rewards, datasets and scoring belong to the customer's own framework. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/use-cases/reproducible-rl-environmentsread 2026-11-05 |
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DaytonaTesting, Debugging & Optimization Evaluations and reinforcement learning run on Daytona, but it does not score them. Its guides run training with HUD, TRL, veRL and OpenEnv in sandboxes, along with a benchmark agent across several languages. The datasets, reward functions and scoring belong to those frameworks. Daytona offers no fixtures, scoring or quality gates for a customer's agent workflows, and no way to compare agent runs. Sourcedaytona.io/docs/llms.txtread 2026-09-22 |
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| Specialist automation | ||
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Browser & Computer Use Browser, desktop, or remote/local computer control for workflows that cannot be handled through stable APIs alone. |
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boxdBrowser & Computer Use Agents drive a real browser on the machine's own desktop. Every machine ships a browser automation CLI built for agents, backed by Chromium with anti bot fingerprinting and a persistent profile so logins stick, and scripts get the same browser through Playwright. A machine can also drive a Chrome window on the user's laptop over the DevTools protocol, for sites that only accept the user's own network, and the preinstalled agents get a browser tool for it automatically. Any GUI app installed on the machine opens on the same desktop. Sourcedocs.boxd.sh/guides/launch-a-browserread 2026-11-05 |
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DaytonaBrowser & Computer Use The Computer Use API gives an agent programmatic control of a desktop in the sandbox, from mouse and keyboard to screenshots, screen recording and display operations, on Linux and Windows. VNC lets a person watch or take over. The desktop runs remotely on Daytona's infrastructure. macOS sandboxes run on Mac hardware reserved for the customer through use.computer, with their own API key, and the Daytona SDKs, CLI and API do not manage them. Sourcedaytona.io/docs/en/computer-useread 2026-10-23 |
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Pricing snapshot
Sourced from the Index pricing dataset · open each vendor's profile for full detail.
| Pricing | b boxd |
D Daytona |
|---|---|---|
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Entry price Lowest public entry point |
Pay as you go with €30 of free credit, at €0.039 per active vCPU hour and €0.012 per GiB hour of memory in use. | Usage based · $200 free compute · vCPU $0.0504/h, memory $0.0162/GiB-h |
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Pricing confidence How public the numbers are |
Public, exact | Public, exact |
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Billing Primary billing axis |
Per second active vCPU, memory in use and disk written | Per second compute and memory, plus metered storage |
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Variable cost Workload / overage exposure |
High variable cost | High variable cost |
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Free tier / trial Try before you buy |
Free tier
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Free tier
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Buying motion Self-serve vs sales call |
Mixed | Self-serve |
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Pricing verified When this pricing was last checked |
Product updates
Newest first, each linked to its source.
boxd gives conflicting accounts of its US region, and its SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications are still in progress. Daytona claims HIPAA, SOC 2 and GDPR compliance. boxd prices in euros.
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