AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to The Cloud for AI Agents
Spin up secure sandboxes in ~100 ms
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1
The stack: two agents on separate boxes. The public one (nullclaw) is a 678 KB Zig binary using ~1 MB RAM, connected to an Ergo IRC server. Visitors talk to it via a gamja web client embedded in my site. The private one (ironclaw) handles email and scheduling, reachable only over Tailscale via Google's A2A protocol. Tiered inference: Haiku 4.5 for conversation (sub-second, cheap), Sonnet 4.6 for tool use (only when needed). Hard cap at $2/day. A2A passthrough: the private-side agent borrows the gateway's own inference pipeline, so there's one API key and one billing relationship…
Mar 2026 · georgelarson.me · its alternatives →
- 2
InstaVM▲109Teaching AI agents to find security vulnerabilities by distilling 4,000 paid HackerOne bug bounty reports — from PDF cracking to API hacking with CLI tools.
May 2026 · instavm.io · its alternatives →
- 3
I wanted to see how fast an isolated code sandbox could start if I never had to boot a fresh VM. So instead of launching a new microVM per execution, I boot Firecracker once with Python and numpy already loaded, then snapshot the full VM state. Every execution after that creates a new KVM VM backed by a `MAP_PRIVATE` mapping of the snapshot memory, so Linux gives me copy-on-write pages automatically. That means each sandbox starts from an already-running Python process inside a real VM, runs the code, and exits. These are real KVM VMs, not containers: separate guest kernel, separate guest…
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 4
Buda▲197Run 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 →
- 5
I've been working on CloudRouter, a skill + CLI that gives coding agents like Claude Code and Codex the ability to start cloud VMs and GPUs. When an agent writes code, it usually needs to start a dev server, run tests, open a browser to verify its work. Today that all happens on your local machine. This works fine for a single task, but the agent is sharing your computer: your ports, RAM, screen. If you run multiple agents in parallel, it gets a bit chaotic. Docker helps with isolation, but it still uses your machine's resources, and doesn't give the agent a browser, a desktop, or a GPU to…
Feb 2026 · cloudrouter.dev · its alternatives →
- 6
Sandboxes aren't enough. Give your agent a real computer and get back to building.
2017 · fly.io · its alternatives →
- 7
agent-manager▲102The fastest workflow for developing with AI
Aug 2026 · agent-manager.dev · its alternatives →
- 8
CreateOS Sandbox▲153Instant, hardware Isolated Sandboxes for AI agents
Jul 2026 · createos.sh · its alternatives →
- 9RL
Hello Hacker News! We're Yangqing, Xiang and JJ from lepton.ai. We are building a platform to run any AI models as easy as writing local code, and to get your favorite models in minutes. It's like container for AI, but without the hassle of actually building a docker image. We built and contributed to some of the world's most popular AI software - PyTorch 1.0, ONNX, Caffe, etcd, Kubernetes, etc. We also managed hundreds of thousands of computers in our previous jobs. And we found that the AI software stack is usually unnecessarily complex - and we want to change that. Imagine if you are a…
2023 · lepton.ai · its alternatives →
- 10
Clawezy▲77Deploy autonomous OpenClaw AI agent servers in seconds
Feb 2026 · clawezy.com · its alternatives →
- 11
NanoKVM-Go▲119Give your AI agent physical control over any screen
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12
Skip the setup and run OpenClaw & Hermes, fully managed
Aug 2026 · cloudways.com · its alternatives →
- 13
- 14
Hi HN, we built SuperHQ, an open source app that runs AI coding agents in isolated microVM sandboxes instead of directly on your machine. Each agent gets its own VM with a full Debian environment. You mount your projects in, writes go to a tmpfs overlay so your host is never touched, and you get a diff view to accept or discard changes. API keys never enter the sandbox. We also just launched remote.superhq.ai which acts as a remote control for SuperHQ, allowing you to access your workspaces and agents from anywhere.
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
AI Hive ▲53Build, deploy, and run all your AI agents in one platform.
May 2026 · app.aihive.global · its alternatives →
- 16
Over the past few months, as we scaled our internal AI Agents, we hit a dead end: Running LLM-generated arbitrary code in Docker is basically running naked on security due to container escape risks. But using full traditional VMs takes minutes to boot and eats too much memory to support high-density concurrency. We loved the developer experience of SaaS sandboxes on the market, but they are closed-source, expensive, and have too high a barrier to entry for self-hosting. So, our team decided to build our own. After months of grinding, using RustVMM and KVM, we built a blazing-fast,…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 17
Hey HN, I built Superserve, a compute layer that lets AI agents live inside isolated Firecracker microVMs with no session time limits. The problem I kept running into: most sandbox providers kill your agent after 24 hours. If you're running something autonomous that needs to work for days — refactoring a codebase, running tests in a loop — you're constantly fighting timeouts and rebuilding state. Superserve lets you snapshot a running VM at any point, fork it into parallel branches, and resume exactly where you left off. Each agent gets its own VM, no shared kernels. There's also a…
Jul 2026 · superserve.ai · its alternatives →
- 18
- 19
Hi HN, I’m the creator of Cordum. I’ve been working in DevOps and infrastructure for years (currently in the fintech/security space), and as I started playing with AI agents, I noticed a scary pattern. Most "safety" mechanisms rely on system prompts ("Please don't do X") or flimsy Python logic inside the agent itself. If we treat agents as autonomous employees, giving them root access and hoping they listen to instructions felt insane to me. I wanted a way to enforce hard constraints that the LLM cannot override, no matter how "jailbroken" it gets. So I built Cordum. It’s an open-source…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20
OpenInfer▲19Keep your OpenClaw agents running. Free beta, no code change
Apr 2026 · openinfer.io · its alternatives →
- 21
Gentity▲3Run any AI agent on its own microVM in 30 seconds
May 2026 · gentity.ai · its alternatives →
- 22LL
Some time ago I built a simple app to run swarms of coding agents — I call it fleet (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48256389). It's based on centralized beads with a Python orchestrator and can run any coder (Claude, agy, Codex). Recently I added a UI to manage the whole agent lifecycle: adding new tasks, monitoring running ones, and a chat interface built on MCP with a centralized SQLite DB. From the UI I can spawn agents to run in any directory, define dependencies on other tasks, and specify which coder/model should do the job. Today I can run 10–15 agents…
Jun 2026 · its alternatives →
- 23BA
- 24
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 →
Also compare
- I put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layer alternatives
- InstaVM alternatives
- Sub-millisecond VM sandboxes using CoW memory forking alternatives
- Buda alternatives
- Skill that lets Claude Code/Codex spin up VMs and GPUs alternatives
- Fly – A global load balancer with middleware alternatives
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 →