CompareHead to head
Daytona vs Modal
Daytona: Linux containers by default and real VMs on request, with a 15-minute idle stop, a 10 GiB disk cap and two regions. Modal: gVisor containers by default with a five-minute lifetime, no pause at all, and a CPU unit that may be one or two vCPUs depending on which reading you trust.
Short answer: Daytona is the cheaper fit for 3 of 9 common workloads and Modal for 2; for the rest neither runs it as described or they cost the same. Daytona offers 45 of 78 checked capabilities without a catch, Modal 36; they differ on 33. Prices checked 29 October 2026.
What each costs
Monthly machine cost at list prices, before any AI model. A catch means it cannot run the workload exactly as described.
| Workload | Daytona | Modal |
|---|---|---|
| A personal agent that stays on (Hermes, OpenClaw) | $122.07 on Pay as you go Catch: 20 GiB of disk is over the 10 GiB limit. | $143.71 on Starter Catch: Sessions end after 24 hours, so an always-on machine has to be restarted by your own code. Modal sandboxes have no stopped state; keeping files needs a Volume or a snapshot. |
| A coding agent for one developer | $55.75 on Pay as you go Catch: 40 GiB of disk is over the 10 GiB limit. | $46.15 on Starter Catch: Modal sandboxes have no stopped state; keeping files needs a Volume or a snapshot. |
| A code interpreter inside your product | $55.38 on Pay as you go | $49.32 on Starter |
| A browser agent for a small team | $830.70 on Pay as you go | $1,159.80 on Starter |
| Self-hosted n8n for a small team | $122.07 on Pay as you go Catch: 20 GiB of disk is over the 10 GiB limit. | $143.71 on Starter Catch: Sessions end after 24 hours, so an always-on machine has to be restarted by your own code. Modal sandboxes have no stopped state; keeping files needs a Volume or a snapshot. |
| A Discord or Slack bot for one server | $60.84 on Pay as you go | $56.86 on Starter Catch: Sessions end after 24 hours, so an always-on machine has to be restarted by your own code. Modal sandboxes have no stopped state; keeping files needs a Volume or a snapshot. |
| Claude Code for a team of five | $278.76 on Pay as you go Catch: 40 GiB of disk is over the 10 GiB limit. | $350.74 on Starter Catch: Modal sandboxes have no stopped state; keeping files needs a Volume or a snapshot. |
| A scraper that runs four times a day | $1.67 on Pay as you go | $0.00 on Starter |
| Your own remote MCP server | $49.01 on Pay as you go | $39.33 on Starter Catch: Sessions end after 24 hours, so an always-on machine has to be restarted by your own code. Modal sandboxes have no stopped state; keeping files needs a Volume or a snapshot. |
Feature by feature
The figure that decides each feature, from each provider's own pages.
| Feature | Daytona | Modal |
|---|---|---|
| Isolation | Partly Containers; VM on request | Partly gVisor; VM on request |
| Sizes and regions | Partly 4 vCPU / 8 GiB / 10 GiB | Partly No fixed sizes; 1 core = 2 vCPU |
| Lifecycle | Partly VM pause: RAM; container stop | No No pause; terminate |
| Snapshots and forks | Partly Hot: RAM (VM); cold: disk | Partly Filesystem 30 d; memory 7 d |
| Storage | Partly 10 GiB cap; volumes free | Partly 512 GiB; billed as memory |
| Idle and waking | Partly 15 min container; 60 min VM | Partly 5 min lifetime; no idle |
| Reaching it | Partly Token, or signed URL | Yes Connect token |
| Custom domains | Partly Own proxy | Yes Team+, manual |
| Outbound network | Partly Tier 3 for internet | Yes $0.04/GiB |
| Keys and secrets | Yes No, proxy headers only | Partly Env vars, or beta proxy |
| Ways to drive it | Yes Yes, playground | Partly No; SDK |
| Built-in agents | Partly None; guides | No None; SDK |
| Teams and accounts | Partly Org-wide resource pool | Partly Environment budgets |
| Billing models | Partly $0.0504/vCPU-hour | Partly $0.141912/core-hour |
| Trials and free tiers | Yes $200 credit, no card | Partly $30/month credits |
| The company | Partly Daytona Platforms Inc.; 99.95% Tier 4+ | Partly Modal Labs, Inc.; no public SLA |
Where they differ
The 33 capabilities where one does something the other does not, or does it with a catch.
| Capability | Daytona | Modal |
|---|---|---|
| Docker inside | Yes | With a catch Docker needs the VM runtime; the default gVisor sandbox cannot run it. |
| Any size you like | With a catch You pick from fixed sizes, and anything different needs a custom limit arranged through support. | Yes |
| Large machines | With a catch A normal sandbox stops at 4 cores and 8 GB; larger machines only come attached to graphics cards. | Yes |
| Resize while running | With a catch You can add cores and memory while it runs, but you cannot shrink them, and the feature has to be switched on by support first. | No Resources are fixed when the sandbox is created; changing them means starting a new one. |
| Pause keeps memory | With a catch Only the full virtual machine can be paused with memory; a container sandbox loses what was running. | No |
| Copy a running machine | Yes | No |
| Files survive a stop | Yes | No |
| Large disk | No The organisation ceiling is 10 GiB of disk per sandbox, though some Windows presets list 50 GiB. | Yes |
| Can stay on indefinitely | Yes | With a catch No sandbox can run longer than 24 hours, however busy it is. |
| Choose the idle timeout | Yes | With a catch You can set an idle timeout, but reaching it ends the machine rather than pausing it. |
| Scheduled runs | No | Yes |
| Public link to a port | Yes | With a catch A normal web port needs a connect token; only a port exposed as raw traffic is open to anyone. |
| Real SSH | Yes | With a catch The machine has no SSH server; you have to install one and open a port for it. |
| Terminal in the browser | Yes | Not published |
| Non-web ports | Not published | Yes |
| Automatic HTTPS | No You run the forwarding service, so you also get and renew the certificate. | With a catch Certificates come with the domain, but only on Team and Enterprise plans and after a manual setup step. |
| Outbound data included | Not published | Yes |
| Fixed outgoing IP | Not published | With a catch Only Team and Enterprise plans get it, and each account can create one or three gateways holding up to five addresses each. |
| Secrets the agent cannot read | Yes | With a catch The feature that hides keys is in beta and cannot be changed once set up. |
| Limited API keys | Yes | With a catch Permissions come from a person's workspace role, not from a key that can only do one thing. |
| Create from the website | Yes | No |
| Documented HTTP API | Yes | No The documented interface is the SDK and its gRPC connection; there is no separate HTTP API to call. |
| MCP server | Yes | No The only MCP guidance is how to deploy someone else's MCP server inside Modal. |
| Coding agents preinstalled | With a catch OpenClaw is in the default snapshot, but Claude Code and Codex are not; those need an install step. | No Nothing is preinstalled and there is no agent API; the agent is code you run. |
| One-click OpenClaw | With a catch OpenClaw is in the default snapshot, but you still run a command to start and configure it. | No No OpenClaw template or guide is published. |
| Browser built in | Not published | No No browser, desktop or computer-use API is documented; the sandbox is a headless container. |
| Desktop for computer use | Yes | No No desktop, VNC or computer-use API is documented. |
| Hard spending cap | With a catch The ceiling is a prepaid pool of computing resources rather than a dollar amount, and running sandboxes are not stopped when it runs out. | Yes |
| Paused costs only storage | Yes | No There is no pause: a sandbox bills until it is shut down, and its saved copy is stored separately. |
| Ongoing free tier | No The $200 is a one-time credit, not something that returns every month. | With a catch Thirty dollars of free compute returns each month, but a payment method must be on file before anything runs. |
| Try without a card | Yes | No A payment method must be on file before you can use Modal at all. |
| Uptime promise (SLA) | With a catch The 99.95% target exists, but service credits go only to Tier 4 and above. | No There is no public SLA; one is attached to the order only if you bought a plan that includes it. |
| Open source or self-hostable | With a catch Only the sandbox compute runs on your own machines, only after Daytona enables it, and the control plane stays Daytona's. | No The client libraries are open source; the platform is not. |
Which to pick
Our reading of the sourced material, not a provider claim.
Pick Daytona for
- A Docker or Windows workload: the VM and Windows classes have their own kernel, and Docker-in-Docker is documented.
- A fast container for untrusted code, priced per reserved vCPU and second, with $200 of free compute and no card.
- A GPU sandbox alongside the CPU ones: up to 8 GPUs per sandbox, though on shared capacity and preemptible.
- Browser or desktop agents: a VNC desktop and a computer-use API are first-class.
Avoid it for
- A workload that needs more than 10 GiB of disk on a Linux sandbox; the 50 GiB presets are Windows only.
- An agent that runs long jobs with no inbound traffic: a container stops after 15 idle minutes even mid-build.
- Full internet on a small account: Tier 1 and 2 are network-restricted and cannot be overridden per sandbox.
- A strict per-tenant boundary: any organisation member or API key can exec in any running sandbox.
Pick Modal for
- High-volume, short-lived code execution: Sandboxes start in about a second and the platform claims over 10,000 creates a second.
- A GPU sandbox for inference or training-adjacent work: up to 8 GPUs per container, priced per GPU-second.
- A team already on Modal: sandboxes share the workspace, Images, Volumes and billing with Functions.
- Splitting trust with sidecars: up to 250 extra containers per sandbox for a proxy or credentials.
Avoid it for
- An agent that needs to pause and resume: there is no paused state, and a memory snapshot terminates the source.
- An always-on box: the lifetime cap is 24 hours and a running idle sandbox bills its full request.
- A cheap always-on dev box: $347 a month documented, $555 on the measured CPU reading.
- A client-facing URL: inbound is closed by default and there is no built-in desktop or browser.
Want a third provider in the picture? Use side by side, or price your own numbers in the cost calculator.