Which is better, Daytona or Prime Sandboxes?
It depends on whether you train on Prime Intellect's platform. For agents and rollouts that wait on a model, Runtime is cheapest: $0.64 for the benchmark, against $1.52 on Prime and $2.76 on Daytona, and every sandbox is a microVM that pauses and forks with memory. Pick Prime Sandboxes for rollouts by the thousand inside that platform. Pick Daytona when training needs GPUs or Windows today.
At a glance
| Daytona | Prime Sandboxes | Runtime | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Isolation | Containers by default; VM sandboxes as a separate class | Hardware-virtualized microVM, own guest kernel | Firecracker microVM, own kernel, every sandbox |
| CPU | $0.0504 per allocated vCPU-hour | $0.02 per vCPU-hour while running | $0.025 per vCPU-hour of measured CPU, with a small floor |
| Memory | $0.0162 per GiB-hour | $0.0125 per GiB-hour | $0.0075 per reserved GiB-hour |
| Pause and fork | On VM sandboxes | Filesystem checkpoints and forks; no memory | Every sandbox; forks keep memory |
| At once | Set by tier | 1,024 per account to start | 100 on a paid account |
| GPUs | Offered | Listed as coming soon | Not offered |
| Price terms | None published | Published through 22 December 2026 | Fixed in each quote |
Two routes to RL environments
Both pitch themselves at agent training. Daytona's route is breadth: GPU sandboxes, Windows, snapshots of VM sandboxes and a large free start. Prime's is scale and price: a microVM for every sandbox, a thousand of them concurrently, and CPU at under half Daytona's rate. What Prime lacks today is memory kept between steps: its checkpoints save the filesystem only.
Cost for the same job
The benchmark, 60 seconds a run, priced line by line; Prime's 5 GiB default disk included, Daytona's first 5 GiB free:
- CPU
- 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 2 × $0.0504
- $1.68
- Memory
- 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 4 × $0.0162
- $1.08
- CPU
- 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 2 × $0.02
- $0.67
- Memory
- 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 4 × $0.0125
- $0.83
- Disk
- 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 5 × $0.0002
- $0.02
- CPU
- 1,000 × 20 s / 3,600 × $0.025
- $0.14
- Memory
- 1,000 × 60 s / 3,600 × 4 × $0.0075
- $0.50
A 100,000-run month is $276.00 on Daytona, $151.67 on Prime and $63.89 on Runtime. If each run kept both CPUs busy for the whole minute, the job would be $2.76 on Daytona, $1.52 on Prime and $1.33 on Runtime.
Which one to pick
- Daytona when training needs GPUs or Windows today.
- Prime Sandboxes for rollouts by the thousand on Prime Intellect's own platform.
- Runtime for a microVM per sandbox at the lowest price, pause and forks that keep memory now, and eval harnesses that plug straight in: agent evals and SWE-bench.
See Runtime vs Daytona and Runtime vs Prime Sandboxes.
Runtime Cloud
On Runtime the benchmark costs $0.64: 77% below Daytona and 58% below Prime. It is 1,000 one-minute runs of a 2 vCPU, 4 GiB sandbox doing 20 CPU-seconds of work each, the pattern of an agent or a rollout waiting on a model. Runtime bills that waiting at a floor of a twentieth of a vCPU.
Try a batch of rollouts on the free usage after npx withruntime login.
Existing Daytona code moves with the migration guide.
Sources
Daytona rates checked 25 October 2026; Prime rates checked 25 October 2026.
Facts on this page were checked on 26 October 2026.