spark-vm vs Daytona
Daytona is the most stateful of the sandbox clouds: stop, archive, pause, fork — sandboxes you can put down and pick back up, sold to developers running agent workloads. The question is whose computer the agent actually lives on: a sandbox you rent by the hour, or a machine that belongs to the agent. Different customer, different job.
| spark-vm | Daytona | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A persistent computer for an agent you own: files, jobs, desktop survive to tomorrow. | Stateful sandboxes as a service for developers: containers (+VM/Windows classes) with stop/archive/pause/fork. |
| Persistence model | Always-on by design. The machine doesn't go away between tasks. | Managed statefulness. Pause and resume sandboxes; state persists while you pay for it, per their terms. |
| Price shape | Self-host: free (MIT) + your hardware. Hosted: TBD, priced per box not per seat. | $200 free compute to start, no plan floor. Then $0.0504/vCPU-hr + $0.0162/GiB-hr metered. |
| GPU | No GPU tier today. CPU-only, stated plainly. | Ephemeral GPU. H100 listed at $2.27/hr — the standout in this comparison. |
| Windows | Linux (Ubuntu 24.04) — that's the stack. | Windows classes available, alongside containers and VMs. |
| Secrets handling | Credential proxy. The agent only ever sees hsurr: placeholders; swaps on allowlisted hosts, audited. |
Standard secrets in the sandbox environment. |
| Human approvals | Built in. Sensitive actions pause for a tap on your phone. | Yours to build. No per-action approval plane in the product. |
| Self-host option | Yes. MIT open source; your hardware, your tailnet, today. | No. Hosted service only. |
| Desktop | Yes. A real desktop the agent drives across sessions. | No. Code-execution sandboxes. |
When to pick Daytona instead
Intellectual honesty first: Daytona wins clearly when you're the developer renting managed compute —
- Ephemeral GPUYou need an H100 for a training or inference burst, not a machine that sits around. $2.27/hr on demand beats owning silicon.
- Windows agentsYour agent's work needs Windows. spark-vm is Linux, full stop.
- Metered statefulnessYou like pause/resume/fork semantics and want someone else to run the control plane — at $0.0504/vCPU-hr.
When spark-vm is the better fit
When the customer is the agent, not the developer: Muse, Grok Bot, Dots, or whatever you're running. An agent that lives on the box 24/7 turns per-hour sandbox billing into a standing cost — and state you rent is state you can lose to someone else's terms. spark-vm is the machine the agent lives on, with the credential proxy and approvals that sandboxes don't ship.