CoCalc vs AI Agent Sandboxes

Shared project or agent sandbox?

Agent sandboxes are built to launch isolated execution environments from an API or SDK. Some support persistent files, snapshots, pause and resume, or full virtual machines. CoCalc is built around a persistent shared project that people and agents open and use together.

Choose an agent sandbox when

• You are embedding isolated code execution inside an agent product
• Programmatic lifecycle, concurrency, and per-run environments are the main requirements
• People will review results somewhere outside the execution environment

Choose CoCalc when

• People and agents work directly in the same notebooks, files, documents, terminals, and services
• Collaborators need live work, history, snapshots, and backups in the same project
• The work must persist across sessions, collaborators, reviews, and handoffs
• You need a hosted service, or a local or single-VM installation

Check the operating boundary

Use the product and compute guides to confirm what is available for your deployment, account, and workload. If your design requires automatic fleets of per-run environments, GPU autoscaling, or exclusive GPU capacity, evaluate infrastructure built for those requirements.

• Explore agent workflows
• Evaluate research compute
• Where to run CoCalc

History and backups in every project

Every CoCalc.ai project keeps its history with nothing to set up. TimeTravel records earlier versions of the documents you edit in CoCalc's editors, scheduled snapshots capture the project's files, and backups stored off the host can include the files, the system environment, and the edit history.

The people and AI agents working in a project can recover work themselves, from Recovery in the project's Files or with the CoCalc CLI. When an agent edits real work, you can see what it changed and bring back an earlier version from TimeTravel, a snapshot, or a backup.

A virtual machine per user

Snapshots and backups are possible, but whoever runs the machines has to set them up, watch them, and pay for them on every one.

Ephemeral agent sandboxes

Built for short runs. Some services offer snapshots or persistent volumes; otherwise the environment and its history end with the run, so results have to be saved somewhere else.

A CoCalc.ai project

History, snapshots, and backups are part of the project from the start, on by default for every project, and restorable by the people and agents who work in it.

• How recovery works
• Use TimeTravel

Built for many projects on every host

Regular snapshots and backups are simple for one machine. On CoCalc.ai, thousands of projects can share a host, and every one needs its own schedule without slowing down the people working on that host.

• Snapshots and backups run in separate queues on each host, so a long backup does not hold up the snapshot queue
• Maintenance waits while the host's disk is busy, so interactive work comes first
• Accounts take turns, so one large account cannot crowd out everyone else
• Deleting old snapshots normally waits until no backup or project start is running on the host