bochka vs Bitbucket Pipelines
Bitbucket Pipelines runs each CI step in a fresh Docker container that is thrown away when the step ends, at most 12 hours later, and its agent steps run one prompt with no follow-up. bochka gives each agent a full VM that keeps its disk, can be reached from outside and runs coding agents you prompt and steer through an API.
Where bochka stands out
A machine that stays
A bochka sandbox keeps its disk. It is saved every minute and when it stops, a stopped sandbox costs nothing, and paid plans have no session cap. You can also fork a running sandbox to try two ideas from the same state.
Reach it from outside
You can SSH into a bochka sandbox, open HTTPS URLs on up to 50 ports, take raw TCP and watch its desktop at 60fps. An agent can run a dev server or an app, and you, a test or a user can use it while it runs.
Agents you steer, keys kept out
Claude Code, Codex and other agents come preinstalled, and you prompt, steer and follow them through one API from any program, as many turns as you need. Real API keys for model providers and any other HTTPS API stay in a credentials proxy outside the sandbox.
The companies and products
bochka
bochka.xyz runs sandboxes for AI agents: each one is a full Linux VM with its own kernel.
You start a machine with one command or one API call, then SSH in, run Docker, open a desktop, or let a built-in agent (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and others) work in it. The disk stays between sessions, and a stopped sandbox costs nothing.
- Isolation
- Full VM per sandbox, own kernel
- Regions
- EU: Germany, Finland, France
Bitbucket Pipelines
Bitbucket Pipelines is the CI/CD service built into Atlassian's Bitbucket Cloud, paid for in build minutes.
This is a CI service, not a sandbox API. Each step in a pipeline starts a new Docker container from an image you choose, runs the commands in bitbucket-pipelines.yml and is torn down when it ends. Agentic Pipelines (beta) adds steps that run Rovo Dev, Claude Code or Codex with one prompt inside that container, for jobs like code review, fixing flaky tests and release notes on a Bitbucket repository.
- Kind of product
- CI/CD built into Bitbucket Cloud; steps are defined in a repository's bitbucket-pipelines.yml
- Machine sizes
- 1x (2 CPU / 4 GB) up to 32x (64 CPU / 128 GB); 4x and up only on paid plans, with dedicated CPUs
- Included minutes
- 50 a month on Free, 2,500 on Standard, 3,500 on Premium; extra minutes are $10 per 1,000
Which use cases each one fits
For each use case, Battleships prices every sandbox provider on the same workload and sorts them from the cheapest monthly bill up. “3rd cheapest of 367” means 2 of the other 366 providers run that workload, with every feature it needs, for less. “With limits” means the provider runs it but misses something, so it is listed after every full match. Open a use case for its whole ranking and what each provider misses.
| Use case and its workload | bochka: price rank | Bitbucket Pipelines: price rank |
|---|---|---|
| Software factory 100 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 2,200 sessions of 8 h a month A software factory needs agents that keep their checkout, Docker cache and dev servers between tasks, which a step container thrown away after each run does not give you. | 3rd cheapest of 367 $634 a month | 348th of 367, with limits $14,476 a month |
| Always-on AI employees 50 machines 24/7 · 2 vCPU / 4 GB An assistant that lives on its machine all month does not fit in steps that end after at most 12 hours and start from a clean container. | 5th cheapest of 366 $657 a month | 354th of 366, with limits $21,897 a month |
| Code interpreter bursts 100 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 200,000 sessions of 1 min a month | 186th of 345, with limits $2,000 a month | 322nd of 345, with limits $1,993 a month |
| Sandboxes for your users 300 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 30,000 sessions of 23 min a month Pipelines only runs steps from your own repositories and takes no inbound traffic, so it is not built to hand machines to your users. | Cheapest of 361 $209 a month | 333rd of 361, with limits $6,297 a month |
| RL rollouts 1,000 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 1,000,000 sessions of 3 min a month Thousands of rollouts at once do not fit a CI service: the Free plan runs at most 10 steps at once, and Atlassian publishes no limit for paid plans. | 34th of 360, with limits $2,000 a month | 320th of 360, with limits $29,993 a month |
| Agent evals 250 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 15,000 sessions of 20 min a month | 10th cheapest of 364 $200 a month | 331st of 364, with limits $4,797 a month |
| CI runners 40 at once · 8 vCPU / 16 GB · 6,000 sessions of 12 min a month Bitbucket Pipelines is the native choice for a Bitbucket repository's builds; bochka suits CI that needs a warm disk between runs, /dev/kvm or jobs longer than 12 hours. | 4th cheapest of 377 $86 a month | 205th of 377, with limits $2,873 a month |
| 24/7 dev boxes 1 machine 24/7 · 4 vCPU / 8 GB A dev box needs SSH, open ports and a disk that stays; a Pipelines step has none of these. | 18th cheapest of 368 $26 a month | 360th of 368, with limits $869 a month |
| Computer-use agents 50 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 20,000 sessions of 15 min a month Steps are headless containers, while bochka gives each agent a desktop streamed at 60fps with computer use built in. | 6th cheapest of 369 $200 a month | 344th of 369, with limits $4,397 a month |
| Browser-use agents 50 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 30,000 sessions of 10 min a month | 7th cheapest of 367 $200 a month | 341st of 367, with limits $2,397 a month |
| Scraping & bots (startup scale) 50 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 100,000 sessions of 3 min a month | 6th cheapest of 346 $90 a month | 335th of 346, with limits $2,918 a month |
| Mass scraping & bots (undetectable) 1,000 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 3,000,000 sessions of 2 min a month | 71st of 338, with limits $1,800 a month | 321st of 338, with limits $58,493 a month |
| Parallel red teaming 200 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 5,000 sessions of 30 min a month | 2nd cheapest of 360 $200 a month | 324th of 360, with limits $1,447 a month |
| GPU eval jobs 10 at once · 8 vCPU / 32 GB · 500 sessions of 30 min a month | Can't run it | Can't run it |
| macOS agents 5 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 1,000 sessions of 20 min a month | Can't run it | Can't run it |
Key features
Every feature Battleships tracks (43)
| Feature | bochka | Bitbucket Pipelines |
|---|---|---|
| Full VM (own kernel) | Yes | No |
| Docker inside | Yes | Yes |
| Nested virtualization | Yes | No |
| Root | Yes | Yes |
| Systemd | Yes | Not published |
| Desktop GUI | Yes | No |
| Browser | Yes | No |
| Computer-use API | Yes | No |
| SSH | Yes | No |
| Persistent disk | Yes | No |
| Pause/resume | Yes | No |
| Automatic snapshots | Yes | No |
| Fork/clone | Yes | No |
| Live fork (no pause) | Yes | No |
| Memory fork | No | No |
| Custom image (Docker or snapshot) | Yes | Yes |
| ≥24 h sessions | Yes | No |
| Idle auto-stop | No | Yes |
| Wake on request | No | No |
| HTTPS preview URLs | Yes | No |
| Raw TCP inbound | Yes | No |
| Public IPv4 | No | No |
| Egress allowlist | No | No |
| Secret proxy | Yes | No |
| Secret proxy for any API | Yes | No |
| Preinstalled agents | Yes | Yes |
| Agent harness API | Yes | Yes |
| MCP server | No | Yes |
| GPU | No | No |
| Windows | No | No |
| Arm64 | No | Yes |
| Self-hosting | No | Yes |
| BYOC | No | No |
| Open source | No | No |
| Scoped API keys | Yes | Not published |
| Spend limits | Yes | Yes |
| Usage per sandbox (API) | Yes | No |
| Audit logs | No | Yes |
| SSO | No | Yes |
| SOC 2 | No | Yes |
| HIPAA | No | No |
| EU data residency | Yes | No |
| Zero data retention | Yes | Not published |
Performance
There is no comparable measurement for Bitbucket Pipelines in the hpc-sandbox-benchmarks CPU test. bochka did 26.69 runs per second on it at 4 vCPU / 8 GB, on dedicated AMD Ryzen 9 9950X hosts.
Node.js build-and-test loop at 4 vCPU / 8 GB, higher is better. Measured with the open hpc-sandbox-benchmarks suite. Bitbucket Pipelines has no published run in this suite yet, so there is no like-for-like number to compare.
Pricing in five scenarios
Each bill is priced from the providers' public price lists by the open Battleships engine, with the cheapest plan that runs the scenario.
| Scenario | bochka, a month | Bitbucket Pipelines, a month |
|---|---|---|
| One coding agent, workdays 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, 8 hours a day, 22 days a month, files kept between days | $20 · $20/mo | $183 · Standard · with limits |
| One agent that never stops 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, running 24/7 all month | $26 · $20/mo | $869 · Standard · with limits |
| 50 agents in parallel 50 machines of 4 vCPU / 8 GB at once, 8-hour sessions, 1,100 sessions a month, Docker inside | $317 · $20/mo × 3 seats | $9,504 · Free · with limits |
| Sandboxes for your users 2 vCPU / 4 GB, 30,000 sessions of 10 minutes a month, up to 300 at once | $200 · $100/mo × 2 seats | $2,697 · Standard · with limits |
| 1,000 short jobs at once 2 vCPU / 4 GB, 1,000 at once, 3 minutes each, 200,000 jobs a month | $2,000 · $2000/mo · with limits | $5,993 · Standard · with limits |
bochka: Plans start at $20 a month, and the whole fee is usage credit. You pay per second while a sandbox runs, and a stopped sandbox costs nothing and keeps its disk.
Bitbucket Pipelines: Each step uses build minutes equal to its run time times its size, so a 2x step uses twice the minutes of a 1x step. Plans include monthly minutes (Standard is $3.65 per user a month with 2,500 minutes), and extra minutes cost $10 per 1,000.
Limits in those scenarios
Bitbucket Pipelines does not fit any of the five scenarios as a sandbox: it is a CI service, every step ends after 12 hours at most, and nothing on its disk survives to the next step. The Free plan runs at most 10 steps at once and Atlassian publishes no limit for paid plans, so the 50, 300 and 1,000 machine scenarios are not confirmed. On bochka, the 1,000-job burst needs more starts per day than the $2,000 plan allows, and starts above 90 a minute are queued.
| Scenario | bochka | Bitbucket Pipelines |
|---|---|---|
| One coding agent, workdays | None that bite |
|
| One agent that never stops | None that bite |
|
| 50 agents in parallel | None that bite |
|
| Sandboxes for your users | None that bite |
|
| 1,000 short jobs at once |
|
|
Which one should you use?
Use Bitbucket Pipelines when
you build, test and deploy a Bitbucket repository, need very large or Arm build machines, or want a one-shot agent to review pull requests and fix builds inside your existing pipeline.
- Native CI for Bitbucket repositories. For teams on Bitbucket, Pipelines builds, tests and deploys on every push or pull request with nothing extra to connect.
- Big machines and Arm. Builds that need up to 64 CPUs and 128 GB in one step, or Arm, get them on Atlassian's cloud runners.
- Your own runners, free of minutes. You can run steps on your own Linux, Windows or macOS machines, and those steps use no build minutes.
Use bochka when
an agent needs its own full VM that keeps its disk, runs past 12 hours, takes inbound traffic, shows a desktop, takes follow-up prompts and keeps real API keys out of reach.
- A machine that stays. In Pipelines every step starts in a clean container and stops after 12 hours at most, so an agent reinstalls tools and reclones the repo each run, and keeps only what you save as caches or artifacts.
- Reach it from outside. A Pipelines step has no documented way in from the internet, so a preview, a webhook or a live look at what the agent is doing needs a third-party tunnel set up inside the step.
- Agents you steer, keys kept out. An Agentic Pipelines step runs one prompt and ends, with no follow-up turn. Its Claude or Codex key sits in the step as an environment variable the agent can read, where one prompt injection can leak it.
Questions people ask
Can I use Bitbucket Pipelines as a sandbox for AI agents?
For agent tasks on a Bitbucket repository, yes: Agentic Pipelines (beta) runs Rovo Dev, Claude Code or Codex with one prompt inside a step. But each step is a fresh container that ends within 12 hours, takes no follow-up prompt and keeps nothing on its disk afterwards.
Is bochka cheaper than Bitbucket Pipelines?
In the five agent scenarios on this page bochka costs less: one coding agent on workdays comes to $20 a month on bochka and $183 on Pipelines minutes, and one agent running all month comes to $26 versus $869. But Pipelines does not fit these scenarios, and for plain CI the minutes included in your Bitbucket plan can make it the cheaper choice.
How long can a Bitbucket Pipelines step run?
120 minutes by default, and up to 720 minutes (12 hours) if you set max-time. A bochka sandbox has no session cap on paid plans.
Do files persist between Bitbucket Pipelines steps?
Not on the machine. Each step starts a new Docker container, and files carry over only through caches or artifacts that later steps download. A bochka sandbox keeps its disk, saves it every minute and can be stopped and started again.
Can I SSH into a Bitbucket Pipelines step?
Atlassian documents no inbound access to cloud steps; SSH keys in Pipelines are for connecting out to other servers. You can SSH into a bochka sandbox and open HTTPS URLs on up to 50 ports.
Is bochka SOC 2 compliant?
SOC 2 is in progress. We're open about where we stand: live status at status.bochka.xyz and our data retention policy at docs.bochka.xyz/data-retention.
Start a sandbox
Install the CLI, then run bochka new.
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