Gibil vs E2B
Two different shapes of box. Pick by what your agent actually needs to do.
E2B and Gibil both give your code somewhere to run. But the shape of the thing they hand you is different — and the shape decides what your agent can actually do once it's inside.
Two shapes of box
E2B hands you a Firecracker microVM — the same isolation primitive AWS Lambda uses. Cold start is under 200ms, or under 30ms from a snapshot. The product wraps this in Python and TypeScript SDKs so a platform team can call Sandbox.create() from inside their own product to run user-submitted snippets safely. Cursor, Perplexity, and Hugging Face all use E2B for this. It's the right tool when you're embedding code execution into a product.
Gibil hands you a full Hetzner VM — its own kernel, its own root, its own IP, real systemd, Docker-in-Docker that doesn't need a privileged dance. Forges in 30–90 seconds, lives for as long as you set the TTL (15 minutes to 30 days, extendable). It's the right tool when an agent or a developer needs a Linux session — not a snippet runner.
Both are valid. They're different shapes solving different problems.
What you can do inside each one
| Gibil | E2B | |
|---|---|---|
| Shape | Full VM (own kernel) | Firecracker microVM |
| Docker-in-Docker | Yes — native | Yes — template-based |
| SSH | Yes — ssh root@ip works | Yes — exposed via SDK |
| Own public IP | Yes | No |
| Persistent codebase | Yes — repo cloned, stays for the session | Per-sandbox, not first-class |
| Resource ceiling | 48 vCPU / 192 GB (Hetzner CCX63) | 8 vCPU / 8 GB (E2B pricing) |
| Lifetime | 15m to 30d, extendable | 1h Hobby / 24h Pro hard cap |
| Cold start | 30–90s | <200ms cold / <30ms snapshot |
| Primary interface | CLI, MCP, SSH | Python/JS SDK |
| Price (2 vCPU / 4 GB) | ~$0.008/hr | ~$0.17/hr |
| BYOC | Yes — your account (Hetzner + Vultr today, more clouds on the roadmap) | No |
Pricing snapshot: 2026-05-05. Compared per-hour because that matches Gibil's shape (sessions of minutes to days). E2B's per-second billing is better for sub-second sandbox calls — a different unit of work. Vendor links above carry current rates.
The cold start tradeoff
E2B's sub-200ms cold start is genuinely impressive — it's the right tool when you're spinning up hundreds of short-lived sandboxes per minute. The 1-hour (Hobby) or 24-hour (Pro) session cap is the constraint: a box that needs to live for a working day or a working week is the wrong fit.
Gibil's 30–90s cold start is the right tradeoff when the session lives for 10+ minutes. Once the box is up, the agent is operating in a normal Ubuntu — apt install works, systemctl works, man pages are present, Docker-in-Docker doesn't need a workaround. Cold start is noise relative to a real test run.
When E2B is the right tool
- You're building a product that needs to execute user-submitted code (Cursor, Perplexity, Hugging Face all use E2B for this)
- High-volume short executions — thousands of 10-second runs per hour
- Code interpreter use cases — rich output for data science agents
- Your runs fit inside the 1-hour Hobby / 24-hour Pro session cap
- You want millisecond start times and SDK-first integration
When Gibil is the right tool
- An agent (or human) needs a real Linux session that lives for minutes to days
- The session needs Docker services running together (Postgres + Redis + your app + tests)
- You need more than 8 vCPU / 8 GB
- Your code must stay on your own infrastructure (BYOC — Hetzner + Vultr today, more clouds soon)
- The session needs to live longer than 24 hours
- You want any MCP-compatible agent to drive it, not one SDK
Next steps
- Gibil vs Daytona — the container-sandbox alternative
- Gibil vs Claude Code Cloud Sessions — Anthropic's managed VM option
- Quick Start — try Gibil in 5 minutes