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AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Fly – A global load balancer with middleware

Sandboxes aren't enough. Give your agent a real computer and get back to building.

Fly provides isolated Linux computers designed for AI agents, evaluations, and tools that need more than sandboxed environments. Each agent gets its own hardware-isolated Linux box that checkpoints its state, allowing… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Prices are shown for the 4 we have checked on their own sites, 4 of them free or with a free tier. Fly – A global load balancer with middleware launched in 2017; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1
    Fly▲236

    A smart, global load balancer for developers

    2017 · fly.io · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    Instant, hardware Isolated Sandboxes for AI agents

    Jul 2026 · createos.sh · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Spin up secure sandboxes in ~100 ms

    Nov 2025 · hopx.ai · its alternatives →

  4. 4
    Agent Sandboxfree tier, from $0.00025/mo▲97

    Your agent's personal remote computer and drive

    Feb 2026 · agentsandbox.co · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Drop: a rootless Linux sandbox for developers. It isolates coding agents and third-party packages while preserving your work environment.

    29d ago · droprun.sh · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Give coding agents a disposable Linux VM, not your laptop - clawkwork/clawk

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7
    Buda▲197

    Run a full AI agent team in the cloud — no hardware, no setup. Persistent memory, browser automation, parallel agents. The OpenClaw alternative built for teams. Start free.

    May 2026 · buda.im · its alternatives →

  8. 8
    Boxes.devfree tier, from $19/mo▲112

    Hi HN, we’re Nick and Drew, and we’re building boxes.dev – the first cloud-only agentic dev environment (ADE) that gives every Codex and Claude Code agent its own cloud computer. We’re two engineers who previously built Gem (co-founder/CTO and first hire), and we spent the last year coding almost exclusively using Codex and Claude Code. It’s been a huge change to how we code, and it’s been exhilarating seeing the models keep getting better – but we eventually realized that developing on localhost was holding us back: - Git worktrees are clunky to set up and use for parallelizing work -…

    Jun 2026 · boxes.dev · its alternatives →

  9. 9OS
  10. 10
    PaperPodfree tier, from $0.0001/mo▲85

    Hi HN, I’ve been working on PaperPod, an experiment in making compute native to AI agents. PaperPod is a sandbox runtime where coding agents like Claude Code can autonomously execute code, write files, run background processes, expose ports (preview URLs) etc. and pay per ms of usage via the agent native x402 payment protocol. No API keys or complex setup needed. This is early (alpha), but fully usable today with free compute included, no wallets needed, just use your email as X-User-Id in the request! A sample prompt to get started: To use PaperPod compute: 1. Get session: POST…

    Mar 2026 · paperpod.dev · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    When we asked developers from large engineering teams, almost everyone is using Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot. But adoption is still inconsistent. Some of us would have 15 agents running in Claude Code at the same time; some would still refuse to use any of them and write code manually. There's a fragmented AI development problem: - Five developers building similar features, and all of them start from scratch - No way to share "here's how we prompt AI to follow our architecture" - No trail of how the AI changes were generated - People leave the company, so does the their knowledge Aviator…

    2025 · aviator.co · its alternatives →

  12. 12
    ELVES▲113

    Summon your army of AI agents

    Mar 2026 · mvmcode.github.io · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Contribute to vrn21/bouvet.com development by creating an account on GitHub.

    Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    I'm Josh, founder of Synth. We've been working on coding agent optimization with method like GEPA and MIPRO (the latter of which, I helped to originally develop), agent evaluation via methods like RLMs, and large scale deployment for training and inference. We've also worked on patterns for memory, processing live context, and managing agent actions, combining it all in a single stack called Horizons. With the release of OpenAI's Frontier and the consumer excitement around OpenClaw, we think the timing is right to release a v0. It integrates with our sdk for evaluation and optimization but…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Hi HN folks, I have been building AI agents for quite some time now. The shift has gone from LLM + Tools → LLM Workflows → Agent + Tools + Memory, and now we are finally seeing true agency emerge: agents as systems composed of tools, command-line access, fine-grained system capabilities, and memory. This way of building agents is powerful, and I believe it is here to stay. But the real question is: are the systems powering these agents ready for that future? I do not think so. Using Docker for a single agent is not going to scale well, because agents need to be lightweight and fast. LLMs…

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    We just open-sourced Computer, a Computer-Use Interface (CUI) framework that enables AI agents to interact with isolated macOS and Linux sandboxes, with near-native performance on Apple Silicon. Computer provides a PyAutoGUI-compatible interface that can be plugged into any AI agent system (OpenAI Agents SDK , Langchain, CrewAI, AutoGen, etc.). Why Computer? As CUA AI agents become more capable, they need secure environments to operate in. Computer solves this with: • Isolation: Run agents in sandboxes completely separate from your host system. • Reliability: Create reproducible environments…

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17
    Brainfree▲8

    A small, blazingly fast and extensible agent runtime

    Sep 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Coding agents made everything feel fast again - except managing release binaries. Operations like these should be real commands you can run from your terminal: - "Deploy the login fix to staging" - "What's the functional difference between production and staging?" - "Notify me when any security fix hits production" - "Promote Jen's last changes to staging" - "Share the new beta API SDK with the partners at Acme" That's what Fly does. Every time a CI run pushes artifacts to the Fly Registry, it creates a release - including the binaries produced, an AI-generated summary, captured…

    Apr 2026 · jfrog.com · its alternatives →

  19. 19
    Aether▲26

    Since coding agents like Claude Code and Codex came out, I've been pretty obsessed with them. It's hard not to when you're getting a 20x discount on inference. I've also been frustrated by them a lot. I hated walking around with my laptop lid open while connected to a hotspot on my phone, having to tediously accept commands so I don't lose my root directory, and running out of RAM when running multiple agents that were spinning up dev servers in different worktrees at once. A lot of people would say existing cloud agents are the solution to this, as none of the above problems apply to any…

    Jul 2026 · runaether.dev · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    An AI co-worker with its own computer. Self-evolving, persistent memory, MCP server, secure credential collection, email identity. Built on the Claude Agent SDK. - ghostwright/phantom

    Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    Hi HN, We are building Sanbox, a platform for running AI agents in isolated and resumable sandboxes. We use the OpenCode SDK as the harness, support reusable templates, and have a CLI that works with Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, CI, or your terminal. Each sandbox has MicroVM isolation, a persistent filesystem, and live trail of run events. Can also self-host if required for security/compliance. It's on the roadmap to add network ACL, secrets managements, LLM cost tracking & observability. We are also happy to build custom integrations or triggers for specific use cases. For example,…

    Jul 2026 · sanbox.cloud · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    It can also adapt by creating its own tools if its 60+ built in tools fall short. It runs in a debian docker container with chromium and you interact with it through the terminal. Watch it work through a VNC viewer

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    A sandbox service for running untrusted, agent-authored code that reports the isolation boundary each run executed behind. Lessons, no clone needed: https://plimsollmark.github.io/plimsoll/trainers/ - plimsollmark/plimsoll

    10d ago · github.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    Open Source agent Sandboxes. Contribute to mihirahuja1/agentnestOSS development by creating an account on GitHub.

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →