Agentic Index
boxd vs Fly.io Sprites (2026)
Both vendors last verified
Both give each agent a persistent Linux computer that sleeps when idle and wakes on the next request, and they draw the details differently. boxd machines keep memory and running processes through hibernation, fork with memory in under 200ms, run Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode out of the box, and add 128 integrations whose credentials stay outside the machine plus a live desktop where an agent drives a browser. That verdict is the Agentic Index coverage score, graded from each vendor's own published materials.
Fly.io Sprites pause about 30 seconds after activity stops, keep memory only through the first warm pause, checkpoint the filesystem in about a second, and reach more than 40 services through connectors that hold credentials at Fly.io's gateway, with a hosted MCP server to manage them. Sprites bill in dollars per hour awake, with $30 of trial credit and plans such as Hero at $100 a month, while boxd bills in euros with no plan and lets you choose Frankfurt or New York or self host. Choose boxd when forks with memory, a browser or a choice of region decide it, and Sprites when you want per user computers that idle for free, with checkpoints, connectors and an MCP server from Fly.io.
This comparison is published by Agentic Index, an independent agentic AI vendor research platform. boxd and Fly.io Sprites 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 1,140 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, not only its files.
- An agent should drive a real browser on the machine's desktop while a person can step in.
- You need to choose where machines run, in Frankfurt or New York, or in your own cloud account.
- You want to self host the same release free up to 16 vCPUs.
- Automations should run on the machine on schedules and on integration events.
Choose Fly.io Sprites if
- Idle machines should stop compute charges within about 30 seconds of the last activity.
- Agents should checkpoint and restore their own filesystem from inside the machine, with the last five checkpoints mounted read only.
- A hosted MCP server should let Claude or any MCP client create Sprites and run commands in them.
- SDKs should cover Python, JavaScript, Go and Elixir.
- Your organization already runs on Fly.io, with single sign on through Google or GitHub and SOC 2 Type II offered on its paid plans.
| Feature | b boxd |
F Fly.io Sprites |
|---|---|---|
| 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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Fly.io SpritesIntegrations & Tool Calling Agents call outside services through connectors without holding the credentials. An organization stores a credential once, by OAuth for services such as GitHub or with a key, and the Sprite reaches the service through Fly.io's gateway, which identifies the calling Sprite, checks the connector's access policy and attaches the credential. The catalog holds more than 40 connectors, including GitHub, Slack, Notion, OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter, Supabase, Neon, Composio and S3 compatible storage, a Custom API connector covers any token authenticated HTTP API, and a connector refuses every Sprite until a policy grants access by name, label or endpoint. Sourcedocs.fly.io/sprites/concepts/connectorsread 2026-11-05 |
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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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Fly.io SpritesWorkflow Orchestration There is no workflow logic for an agent's steps. Services keep long running processes up, restart them when they crash and start them in dependency order, and a Tasks API keeps a Sprite awake until work finishes, but sequencing, branching and retrying an agent's work stay in the customer's code or framework. Sourcedocs.fly.io/sprites/concepts/servicesread 2026-11-05 |
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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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Fly.io SpritesTriggers & Channel Coverage A request to a Sprite's URL wakes it without the customer's code calling it. If the Sprite's HTTP service is not running when the request arrives, the proxy starts it and forwards the request, so an agent or app served from a Sprite answers traffic while costing nothing in compute between requests. There is no scheduler or webhook. Sourcedocs.fly.io/sprites/concepts/servicesread 2026-11-05 |
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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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Fly.io SpritesKnowledge Grounding & RAG No retrieval index or knowledge base over the customer's content comes with Sprites. Files an agent reads live on the Sprite's disk, and any retrieval runs in the customer's own code. Sourcedocs.sprites.devread 2026-11-05 |
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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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Fly.io SpritesMemory & State Persistence An agent's working state carries across sessions as machine state. A Sprite's disk keeps files, packages, repositories and databases stored on disk through every sleep, a warm pause keeps memory and running processes, and checkpoints copy the filesystem in about a second, with automatic checkpoints in the background and the last five mounted read only. An agent can checkpoint and restore its own Sprite. This is machine state the developer manages, not a memory layer of stated scope that can be reviewed or deleted as memory. Sourcedocs.fly.io/sprites/concepts/checkpointsread 2026-11-05 |
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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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Fly.io SpritesHuman Oversight & Guardrails Work in a Sprite has no approval step, consent checkpoint or escalation to a person. Connector policies, the outbound allowlist and MCP tokens limited to Sprites with a set name prefix restrict what an agent can reach, and an MCP client may ask before destructive tools run, but nothing on Fly.io's side holds an action for review. Sourcedocs.fly.io/sprites/integrations/remote-mcpread 2026-11-05 |
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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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Fly.io SpritesSecurity, Identity & Governance Sprites run in Fly.io organizations, which have admin and member roles and can require single sign on through Google or GitHub. Organization tokens authenticate the command line tool, the API and the SDKs, MCP access is granted by OAuth with tokens limited by default to Sprites with a set name prefix, Sprite URLs are private to the organization unless made public, and connector credentials are stored encrypted outside the machine. Fly.io offers SOC 2 Type II and a HIPAA package with a BAA signed in advance on its paid plans, without saying whether they extend to Sprites. Sourcedocs.fly.io/security/ssoread 2026-11-05 |
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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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Fly.io SpritesObservability & Auditability The machine is measured and the agent's steps are not. Service logs are kept with timestamps and read through the API, the command line tool and the MCP server, usage endpoints break compute and storage down by organization and by Sprite, managed connectors show usage over 24 hours, 7 days or 30 days, and exec sessions can be reattached after a disconnect. There are no traces or audit trail of what an agent did. Sourceapi.sprites.dev/openapi.jsonread 2026-11-05 |
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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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Fly.io SpritesDeployment & Data Residency Sprites run on Fly.io's hosted platform with no choice of region and no self hosted option. Creating a Sprite takes a name and URL settings only. Sourceapi.sprites.dev/openapi.jsonread 2026-11-05 |
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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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Fly.io SpritesPrebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Starting points come as a ready image, plugins and framework integrations. Each Sprite starts from Ubuntu with Node.js, Python, Go, Rust, Java and other languages and AI command line tools preinstalled, plugins connect Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode and other coding agents, and integrations cover Google ADK, the OpenAI Agents SDK, Pydantic AI and TanStack AI. These are tools a developer builds with, not prebuilt agents a business adopts. Sourcefly.io/sprites/ecosystemread 2026-11-05 |
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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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Fly.io SpritesModel Flexibility & Routing The customer chooses the agents and models. Any coding agent or framework can run in a Sprite, and connectors reach OpenAI, Anthropic, OpenRouter, Fireworks, Hugging Face, Ollama Cloud and other model providers with the organization's own keys, or through a managed option for OpenRouter. Sourcefly.io/sprites/ecosystemread 2026-11-05 |
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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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Fly.io SpritesAPIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Sprites are managed through a REST API with a public OpenAPI specification, Python, JavaScript, Go and Elixir SDKs and the sprite command line tool. A hosted MCP server at sprites.dev/mcp, authorized by OAuth, enumerates, creates and destroys Sprites and runs commands, checkpoints, network policy, services and service logs inside them, and an agent inside a Sprite reaches the same controls through a local management socket. Sourcedocs.fly.io/sprites/integrations/remote-mcpread 2026-11-05 |
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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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Fly.io SpritesTesting, Debugging & Optimization There are no test cases, scoring or quality gates for an agent's behavior. Sprites can host evaluation and training environments such as Hugging Face OpenEnv through an experimental provider, with the scoring in the customer's own harness. Sourcedocs.fly.io/sprites/integrations/agent-sdksread 2026-11-05 |
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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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Fly.io SpritesBrowser & Computer Use No browser or desktop for an agent to drive comes with Sprites. The Steel Browser Tools connector returns scraped web content, screenshots and PDFs without browser sessions, and an agent that needs to drive a browser installs and runs one itself inside the Sprite. Sourcefly.io/sprites/ecosystemread 2026-11-05 |
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Pricing snapshot
Sourced from the Index pricing dataset · open each vendor's profile for full detail.
| Pricing | b boxd |
F Fly.io Sprites |
|---|---|---|
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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. | Pay as you go at $0.0385 per CPU hour and $0.021875 per GB of memory an hour while a Sprite is awake, with $30 in trial credits for new users. |
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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 | CPU hours and GB of memory hours while awake, plus hot storage while awake and cold storage until deleted |
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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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No free tierTrial
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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 |
Sprites are a product of Fly.io, which offers SOC 2 Type II and a HIPAA package on its paid plans without saying whether they extend to Sprites. boxd's SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certifications are still in progress, and boxd gives conflicting accounts of its US region. boxd prices in euros.
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