Daytona vs Runloop Daytona is 48% cheaper per agent run

Which is better, Daytona or Runloop?

It depends on whether you want benchmarks as a managed product. For eval and agent runs that wait on a model, Runtime costs least: $0.64 for the job, against $2.76 on Daytona and $5.33 on Runloop, with no plan fee and a pause and forks that keep memory. Pick Runloop for evaluation and RL rollouts from one vendor, or deployment into your own cloud account. Pick Daytona for GPU or Windows sandboxes.

At a glance

Which is better for agent evals and benchmarks?

Runloop sells evaluation as a product. It evaluates models against your own workload rather than mock benchmarks, and generates RL rollouts checked by running them. On Runtime you bring the harness and run each task in its own sandbox.

The cost of a large eval run is where they part. An eval task spends most of its time waiting for the model under test, and the three bill for that time at very different rates:

A Runtime fork also copies a prepared sandbox with its memory and running processes, so a repository installed once can start several attempts from the same point. See agent evals and SWE-bench and RL environments.

Cost for the same job

Worked out for the first row: 1,000 tasks of 60 seconds on 2 vCPU and 4 GiB, 20 CPU-seconds of computing in each. Runloop's matching size is MEDIUM, with 2 CPUs, 4 GB and 8 GB of disk.

Scaled up to 100,000 runs a month, Daytona comes to $276.00, Runloop to $532.56 and Runtime to $63.89. With both CPUs busy for the whole minute, it is $1.33 on Runtime, $2.76 on Daytona and $5.33 on Runloop. Plan fees, storage while stopped, network and free credit are left out.

What survives between sessions?

A suspended Runloop devbox keeps its disk; compute and memory charges stop, and its processes must be restarted when it resumes. Suspend and resume are on the Pro plan. Daytona keeps files and memory when a VM sandbox pauses. A paused Runtime sandbox keeps files, memory and running processes on every sandbox, while you have credit, and wakes on the next request:

Pythonfrom withruntime import Sandboxsbx = Sandbox.create(timeout_seconds=600)sbx.exec("echo state > /workspace/state.txt")sbx.pause()  # memory and files are kept; compute billing stopsagain = Sandbox.connect(sbx.id)again.wake(timeout_seconds=1200)again.extend(600)again.stop()

Which one to pick

• Daytona, for GPU sandboxes or Windows machines at a flat rate well below Runloop's, or a $200 free start.
• Runloop, for evaluation and RL rollouts, delivered as a managed product, or for deployment into your own cloud account with the SOC 2, HIPAA and GDPR readiness it states.
• Runtime, for eval and agent runs at 77% below Daytona's price and 88% below Runloop's, pause and forks that keep memory and processes on every sandbox, and no plan fee.

Moving to Runtime

Daytona code needs one import changed:

TypeScriptimport { Daytona } from "withruntime/daytona"; // was: from "@daytona/sdk"

Pythonfrom withruntime.daytona import Daytona  # was: from daytona import Daytona

Runloop code is ported through the migration table: a devbox is created with Sandbox.create(), commands run through exec, suspend and resume become pause() and wake(), and shutdown is stop(). npx withruntime compare --from runloop reprices your Runloop usage, and credit you add within 30 days of signing up is matched, up to $1,000 in total. A coding agent can do either port from the one instruction in migration, on a branch and on the free usage. See Runtime vs Daytona and Runtime vs Runloop.

Sources

Daytona and Runloop pricing pages rechecked 25 October 2026; the rest checked 25 October 2026.

• Runloop pricing, Devbox sizes, Devbox lifecycle, Runloop
• Daytona pricing, Daytona sandboxes
• Runtime pricing

Facts on this page were checked on 26 October 2026.