Head to head
E2B vs Modal
A side-by-side, sourced comparison. Facts come from each vendor’s own materials; scores are our editorial opinion applied by the same rubric to both.
| Dimension | ||
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Hobby (free) includes a one-time $100 usage credit, up to 1-hour sessions, and 20 concurrent sandboxes. Pro is $150/mo + usage (24-hour sessions, up to 100 concurrent). Usage is per-second (e.g. 1 vCPU at $0.000014/s).source ↗ | Starter is $0 base + $30/mo of free compute credits; Team is $250/mo base + $100/mo credits; Enterprise is custom. Usage is per-second (e.g. H100 GPU at $0.001097/s, CPU at $0.0000131/core/s).source ↗ |
| Hosting model | Hosted cloud that spins up on-demand secure Linux VM sandboxes reachable both internally and via a sandbox URL; self-hostable given the open-source codebase.source ↗ | Fully managed, multi-cloud serverless with a proprietary container runtime and scheduler that autoscales from zero to 1000+ GPUs.source ↗ |
| Memory & state | Sandbox persistence — pausing saves both filesystem and memory state, and connect() resumes the identical state, with paused sandboxes kept indefinitely. This is infrastructure state, not agent/LLM memory.source ↗ | Durable primitives — Volumes (a distributed file system persisted across invocations), plus Dicts and Queues. This is infrastructure state, not agent memory.source ↗ |
| MCP support | Nativesource ↗ | Partialsource ↗ |
| Integrations | First-party Python and JS/TS SDKs, Templates for defining environments, and MCP tools from a Docker catalog (Browserbase, Stripe, GitHub, Notion, and more).source ↗ | A Python-native SDK and CLI as the primary interface, plus Sandboxes, Notebooks, web-endpoint deployment, and observability.source ↗ |
| Model providers | Model-agnostic — you bring your own LLM; E2B runs the code and tools, not the model.source ↗ | Not applicable — pure compute; you bring and run your own models.source ↗ |
| Open source | Yessource ↗ | Nosource ↗ |
| Developer experience(opinion) | 4/5 | 5/5 |
| Pricing transparency & value(opinion) | 4/5 | 4/5 |
| Scalability(opinion) | 4/5 | 5/5 |
| Memory & state(opinion) | 3/5 | 3/5 |
| Integrations(opinion) | 3/5 | 2/5 |
| MCP nativeness(opinion) | 4/5 | 2/5 |
The balanced view
Editorial opinion, derived from the scorecard above
Where E2B scores higher
In our rubric, E2B rates ahead on integrations, mcp nativeness.
Where Modal scores higher
In our rubric, Modal rates ahead on developer experience, scalability.
These two serve different needs — read the full dossiers for E2B and Modal before deciding. Neither has been hands-on tested by us yet.
Product and company names are trademarks of their respective owners and are used here only to identify the products under discussion.