Agentic Index
boxd vs Freestyle (2026)
Both vendors last verified
Both sell full Linux VMs for long running agents that pause with memory intact, clone a running machine and wake on incoming traffic, and they differ in what comes on the machine and around it. boxd ships Claude Code, Codex and OpenCode, 128 integrations whose credentials stay outside the machine, TypeScript automations on schedules and events, and a live desktop where an agent drives a browser and a person can step in, billed per second in euros with no plan fee. That verdict is the Agentic Index coverage score, graded from each vendor's own published materials.
Freestyle focuses on the network around each VM, with firewalls closed by default, outbound rules that inject API keys, database passwords and S3 signatures at its edge, VPCs and WireGuard tunnels, and client session tokens that give an end user access to chosen VMs, on a free plan or Hobby and Pro plans at $50 and $500 a month. Choose boxd when agents need integrations and a browser ready on the machine, and Freestyle when you are building a multi tenant agent product and want fine control of each VM's network and credentials.
This comparison is published by Agentic Index, an independent agentic AI vendor research platform. boxd and Freestyle 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
- Agents should act in GitHub, Linear, Slack or Stripe through ready integrations rather than rules you write.
- An agent should drive a browser on a live desktop that a person can take over.
- Coding agents should arrive preinstalled and configured on every machine.
- Machines should run in Frankfurt or New York, chosen per machine, or on your own KVM hosts.
- Pricing should be pure usage with no monthly plan.
Choose Freestyle if
- Every VM should start with no network access until your rules allow it.
- Credentials for Postgres databases and S3 buckets, not only HTTP APIs, should stay at the edge while the VM connects with placeholders.
- End users of your product should get revocable tokens for their own VMs and Linux users without your team key.
- VMs should join private networks through VPCs and WireGuard tunnels.
- A free plan with 200 vCPU hours a month should cover early testing, with Enterprise adding SAML, SCIM, audit logs and a 99.99% SLA.
| Feature | b boxd |
F Freestyle |
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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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FreestyleIntegrations & Tool Calling Credentials reach outside services without entering the VM. Outbound TLS rules let Freestyle's edge add API keys to requests for services such as OpenAI, Anthropic or OpenRouter, connect to external Postgres with a password the VM never sees, sign S3 requests limited to a bucket, prefix and set of operations, route traffic through the customer's SOCKS5 proxy and reach other VMs by internal names, and WireGuard tunnels connect VMs to remote networks. There are no prebuilt connectors or tool catalog for an agent to call. Sourcefreestyle.sh/docs/vms/network/tls-outboundread 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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FreestyleWorkflow Orchestration There is no workflow logic in the product. Run limits pause a VM after a set time, TTLs delete it and snapshots support branching and rollback, but sequencing, retrying and routing an agent's steps stay in the customer's own code. Sourcefreestyle.sh/docs/vms/lifecycleread 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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FreestyleTriggers & Channel Coverage A paused VM wakes without the customer's code calling it. The next traffic that reaches the VM resumes it with its processes and memory intact, after a forward auth check when one is set, so an agent or app served from a Freestyle VM answers requests at its domain and pauses again when idle. There is no scheduler or webhook. Sourcefreestyle.sh/docs/vms/lifecycleread 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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FreestyleKnowledge Grounding & RAG No retrieval index or knowledge base over the customer's content comes with the platform. Files an agent reads live on the VM's disk, and any retrieval runs as the customer's own software inside the VM. Sourcefreestyle.sh/docs/vmsread 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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FreestyleMemory & State Persistence An agent's working state carries across sessions as machine state. A paused VM keeps its memory and resumes the same processes, persistent VMs keep their disks between runs, and snapshots and live cloning create new VMs that match the original for branching and recovery. Files on a paused VM stay readable without resuming it. This is machine state the developer manages, not a memory layer of stated scope that can be reviewed or deleted as memory. Sourcefreestyle.sh/docs/vms/lifecycleread 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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FreestyleHuman Oversight & Guardrails Work in a VM has no approval step, consent checkpoint or escalation to a person. A default closed firewall, forward auth on domains and credentials held at the edge limit what an agent can reach, but nothing holds an action until someone reviews it. Sourcefreestyle.sh/docs/vms/network/firewallread 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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FreestyleSecurity, Identity & Governance Team API keys manage resources, and client sessions give an end user or agent its own identity with access to chosen VMs and Linux users through a token that can be revoked without rotating the team key. Secrets in outbound rules are write only and sealed at rest, and every VM starts with no network access until rules allow it. SAML single sign on and SCIM come with Enterprise, and Freestyle names no compliance attestation. Sourcefreestyle.sh/docs/vms/client-sessionsread 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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FreestyleObservability & Auditability Audit logs come with the Enterprise plan. No logs, metrics or traces come with the VMs, so what an agent did inside a VM is visible only through the customer's own tooling and the command output returned to the caller. Sourcefreestyle.sh/pricingread 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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FreestyleDeployment & Data Residency Freestyle runs as a hosted service with no choice of region and no self hosted or customer cloud option. VPCs and WireGuard tunnels connect VMs to the customer's networks without moving where the VMs run. Sourcefreestyle.sh/docs/vms/pricing-and-limitsread 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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FreestylePrebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Starting points come as base snapshots and setup guides. Public base snapshots include Kali Linux and BusyBox and sit outside each plan's snapshot limit, and guides set up Claude Code, Python, Node.js, Go, Bun, Chromium, Docker, PostgreSQL, Redis, Supabase and Vite on a VM. These are environments a developer builds from, not prebuilt agents a business adopts. Sourcefreestyle.sh/docs/vms/base-snapshotsread 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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FreestyleModel Flexibility & Routing The customer chooses the agents and models that run on a VM. Outbound rules inject keys for providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic or OpenRouter, and a JSON patch rule can set or change the model field in request bodies at the edge, so the customer can pin which model an agent calls. Sourcefreestyle.sh/docs/vms/network/tls-outboundread 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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FreestyleAPIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility A TypeScript SDK and the freestyle command line tool cover VMs, execution, files, snapshots, PTY sessions, domains, firewall rules, VPCs, tunnels, outbound TLS rules, client session identities and API tokens. Freestyle offers no MCP server or public REST reference. Sourcefreestyle.sh/docs/quickstartread 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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FreestyleTesting, Debugging & Optimization There are no test cases, scoring or quality gates for an agent's behavior. Snapshots and cloning let experiments branch and roll back, with any evaluation done in the customer's own code. Sourcefreestyle.sh/docs/vmsread 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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FreestyleBrowser & Computer Use No browser or desktop for an agent to drive comes with the platform. Chromium appears among the setup guides for software to install on a VM, and an agent that needs a browser runs and drives it itself. Sourcefreestyle.shread 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 Freestyle |
|---|---|---|
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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. | Hobby at $50 a month, which covers usage up to $50 before further usage bills, after a free plan with hard limits. |
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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 | vCPU hours, GiB of memory hours and GiB of storage hours, plus data transfer |
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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 | Mixed |
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Pricing verified When this pricing was last checked |
Freestyle offers no choice of region and has no public compliance attestation. 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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