Northflank vs Ona
Northflank is a self-serve cloud platform where sandboxes are one kind of workload, billed per second, with GPUs and regions around the world. Ona, formerly Gitpod and now part of OpenAI, gives engineers and its Codex agent governed dev environments, and new customers can only buy it on an Enterprise contract through sales.
The companies and products
Northflank
Northflank is a London developer platform for running services, jobs and databases on Kubernetes, and Sandboxes is its product for running untrusted code.
A Northflank sandbox is a container image deployed as a service: CPU sandboxes run in Kata microVMs with their own kernel, and GPU sandboxes run under gVisor. You create and drive them from the JavaScript or Python SDK, the CLI or the dashboard, on Northflank's cloud or inside your own. It suits teams that already want one platform for apps, databases, GPUs and sandboxes.
Ona
Ona, formerly Gitpod, is a platform for cloud dev environments and background coding agents, and is now part of OpenAI.
Ona is a different kind of product from bochka: a dev-environment platform, not a sandbox API. Each task or developer gets an isolated VM built from a Dev Container config, which people open in a browser IDE, VS Code or JetBrains, and where Ona's Codex Agent can plan, code, test and open pull requests. It is built for engineering teams who want the same governed environment for every developer and agent; new customers run it in their own AWS or GCP account on an Enterprise contract.
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. “38th cheapest of 377” means 37 of the other 376 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 | Northflank: price rank | Ona: price rank | bochka: price rank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software factory 100 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 2,200 sessions of 8 h a month A coding agent installs packages all over its machine: Northflank keeps only attached volumes when paused, Ona keeps the disk but sells through sales, and bochka keeps the whole disk on every plan. | 159th of 367, with limits $1,477 a month | 324th of 367, with limits $7,315 a month | 3rd cheapest of 367 $634 a month |
| Always-on AI employees 50 machines 24/7 · 2 vCPU / 4 GB On Ona an always-on assistant needs auto-stop set to Never, because background work does not count as activity; Northflank never auto-pauses but resets everything outside volumes when you pause it. | 173rd of 366, with limits $1,365 a month | 83rd of 366, with limits $8,504 a month | 5th cheapest of 366 $657 a month |
| Code interpreter bursts 100 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 200,000 sessions of 1 min a month Short code runs fit Northflank best of the two, with per-second plans from a tenth of a vCPU and no monthly fee. | 84th of 345, with limits $115 a month | 335th of 345, with limits $5,320 a month | 186th of 345, with limits $2,000 a month |
| Sandboxes for your users 300 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 30,000 sessions of 23 min a month Northflank can hand each of your users a sandbox in a region near them, while Ona is built for your own engineers and its SDK is on the Enterprise plan only. | 89th of 361, with limits $815 a month | 330th of 361, with limits $5,988 a month | Cheapest of 361 $209 a month |
| RL rollouts 1,000 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 1,000,000 sessions of 3 min a month | 342nd of 360, with limits $1,762 a month | 283rd of 360, with limits $9,773 a month | 34th of 360, with limits $2,000 a month |
| Agent evals 250 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 15,000 sessions of 20 min a month | 134th of 364, with limits $689 a month | 334th of 364, with limits $5,768 a month | 10th cheapest of 364 $200 a month |
| CI runners 40 at once · 8 vCPU / 16 GB · 6,000 sessions of 12 min a month Northflank fits CI runs well with per-second billing; Ona starts each run from a prebuild, and bochka adds /dev/kvm for Android emulators and VM builds. | 38th cheapest of 377 $352 a month | 365th of 377, with limits $5,461 a month | 4th cheapest of 377 $86 a month |
| 24/7 dev boxes 1 machine 24/7 · 4 vCPU / 8 GB Ona is a full cloud IDE with Dev Containers and prebuilds, Northflank is headless, and bochka is a full VM you reach over SSH, HTTPS or a desktop. | 151st of 368, with limits $59 a month | 368th of 368, with limits $5,140 a month | 18th cheapest of 368 $26 a month |
| Computer-use agents 50 at once · 4 vCPU / 8 GB · 20,000 sessions of 15 min a month Neither Northflank nor Ona has a graphical desktop inside the sandbox, while bochka streams a 60fps desktop with Chromium for computer use. | 151st of 369, with limits $371 a month | 353rd of 369, with limits $5,691 a month | 6th cheapest of 369 $200 a month |
| Browser-use agents 50 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 30,000 sessions of 10 min a month | 200th of 367, with limits $194 a month | 150th of 367, with limits $5,346 a month | 7th cheapest of 367 $200 a month |
| Scraping & bots (startup scale) 50 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 100,000 sessions of 3 min a month | 196th of 346, with limits $117 a month | 146th of 346, with limits $5,468 a month | 6th cheapest of 346 $90 a month |
| Mass scraping & bots (undetectable) 1,000 at once · 1 vCPU / 2 GB · 3,000,000 sessions of 2 min a month | 83rd of 338, with limits $2,049 a month | 261st of 338, with limits $14,360 a month | 71st of 338, with limits $1,800 a month |
| Parallel red teaming 200 at once · 2 vCPU / 4 GB · 5,000 sessions of 30 min a month | 141st of 360, with limits $99 a month | 93rd of 360, with limits $5,228 a month | 2nd cheapest of 360 $200 a month |
| GPU eval jobs 10 at once · 8 vCPU / 32 GB · 500 sessions of 30 min a month Northflank has GPU sandboxes from L4 to H100 and up; Ona only offers GPU instance types on Enterprise runners in your own cloud, and bochka is CPU only. | 4th cheapest of 98 $693 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 | Can't run it |
Key features
| Feature | Northflank | Ona | bochka |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kind of product | Developer platform for services, jobs, databases and GPUs, with sandboxes as one workload type | Cloud dev environments for engineers and the Codex agent | Sandbox API for agents: full VMs you create and drive from code |
| Isolation | Kata microVM with its own kernel for CPU; gVisor for GPU | Isolated VM per environment, built from a Dev Container config | Full VM with its own kernel on dedicated AMD Ryzen 9 9950X hosts |
| Buying it | Self-serve, billed per second with no monthly fee | New Core subscriptions are closed; new customers buy Enterprise through sales | Self-serve plans from $20 a month, all of it usage credit |
| What survives a stop | Only attached volumes, billed while paused; the rest of the disk and all processes reset | The disk persists; in your own cloud its storage is billed while stopped, and Core archives a stopped environment after 3 days | The whole disk, saved every minute and on stop; a stopped sandbox costs nothing |
| Snapshots and fork | Opt-in filesystem snapshots of a running or stopping sandbox, restored into a new one | No way to copy an environment; prebuilds snapshot the filesystem on a schedule | Automatic disk snapshots; fork a running sandbox |
| Docker and nested virtualization | Docker inside, since each sandbox has its own kernel; /dev/kvm not documented | Docker and root inside the Dev Container; nested virtualization not documented | Docker, root, systemd and /dev/kvm on every machine |
| Desktop and browser | Headless; access by SDK, browser terminal or SSH | Browser IDE plus VS Code and JetBrains; no graphical desktop inside | 60fps Linux desktop, Chromium and computer use built in |
| Coding agents | Harnesses with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode or Pi, reached through a terminal or SSH | Codex Agent started from chat, a Linear issue or an automation; Claude Code you run yourself | Seven agents preinstalled, with a prompt, steer and events API |
| Driving it from code | JavaScript or Python SDK, CLI or dashboard | Python, TypeScript and Go SDK on the Enterprise plan only | API and SDK on every plan, including the trial |
| Keeping API keys out of the sandbox | Header injection for listed hosts in the network policy API; otherwise env vars or files | Secrets injected as environment variables or files | Credentials proxy for model providers and any HTTPS API; switch a credential to another account when credits run out |
| Inbound access | HTTPS ports on a code.run domain, private by default; public TCP and UDP need a separate load balancer | HTTPS URL per port for you, your organization or everyone; SSH; no raw TCP documented | HTTPS URLs for up to 50 ports, token-protected by default; raw TCP; dedicated IPv4 or IPv6 |
| Idle stop | No idle auto-pause; bills the full plan until you pause it | Stops after 30 minutes without SSH, IDE or agent activity by default; can be set to Never | Runs until you stop it; no session cap on paid plans |
| GPUs | L4, A100, H100, RTX PRO 6000 and more, billed per hour | GPU instance types on Enterprise runners in your own cloud, such as one NVIDIA A10G | No |
| Regions and deployment | US, Europe, Asia, Australia, South America and Africa; your own cloud, or the control plane in your VPC on Enterprise | Enterprise runners in your own AWS or GCP account; Ona Cloud in Frankfurt and North Virginia for existing Core subscribers | EU only (Germany, Finland, France) |
Every feature Battleships tracks (43)
| Feature | Northflank | Ona | bochka |
|---|---|---|---|
| Full VM (own kernel) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Docker inside | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Nested virtualization | No | No | Yes |
| Root | Not published | Yes | Yes |
| Systemd | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Desktop GUI | No | No | Yes |
| Browser | No | Yes | Yes |
| Computer-use API | No | No | Yes |
| SSH | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Persistent disk | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Pause/resume | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Automatic snapshots | Yes | No | Yes |
| Fork/clone | Yes | No | Yes |
| Live fork (no pause) | Yes | No | Yes |
| Memory fork | No | No | No |
| Custom image (Docker or snapshot) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| ≥24 h sessions | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Idle auto-stop | No | Yes | No |
| Wake on request | No | No | No |
| HTTPS preview URLs | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Raw TCP inbound | Yes | No | Yes |
| Public IPv4 | No | No | No |
| Egress allowlist | Yes | No | No |
| Secret proxy | Yes | No | Yes |
| Secret proxy for any API | Yes | No | Yes |
| Preinstalled agents | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Agent harness API | No | Yes | Yes |
| MCP server | No | No | No |
| GPU | Yes | Yes | No |
| Windows | No | No | No |
| Arm64 | Yes | No | No |
| Self-hosting | Yes | No | No |
| BYOC | Yes | Yes | No |
| Open source | No | No | No |
| Scoped API keys | Not published | Not published | Yes |
| Spend limits | Not published | Yes | Yes |
| Usage per sandbox (API) | Yes | No | Yes |
| Audit logs | Yes | No | No |
| SSO | Yes | Yes | No |
| SOC 2 | Yes | Yes | No |
| HIPAA | Yes | No | No |
| EU data residency | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Zero data retention | Not published | Not published | Yes |
Performance
There is no comparable CPU measurement for Northflank or Ona: neither has a result on the hpc-sandbox-benchmarks test we use. bochka did 26.69 Node.js build-and-test runs per second 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. Northflank and Ona have 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 | Northflank, a month | Ona, a month | bochka, 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 | $32 · Developer Sandbox (free tier) · with limits | $5,030 · Enterprise (AWS Marketplace 12-month contract) · with limits | $20 · $20/mo |
| One agent that never stops 4 vCPU / 8 GB, 50 GB disk, running 24/7 all month | $108 · Developer Sandbox (free tier) · with limits | $5,140 · Enterprise (AWS Marketplace 12-month contract) · with limits | $26 · $20/mo |
| 50 agents in parallel 50 machines of 4 vCPU / 8 GB at once, 8-hour sessions, 1,100 sessions a month, Docker inside | $1,322 · Developer Sandbox (free tier) · with limits | $6,521 · Enterprise (AWS Marketplace 12-month contract) · with limits | $317 · $20/mo × 3 seats |
| Sandboxes for your users 2 vCPU / 4 GB, 30,000 sessions of 10 minutes a month, up to 300 at once | $361 · Developer Sandbox (free tier) · with limits | $5,432 · Enterprise (AWS Marketplace 12-month contract) · with limits | $200 · $100/mo × 2 seats |
| 1,000 short jobs at once 2 vCPU / 4 GB, 1,000 at once, 3 minutes each, 200,000 jobs a month | $688 · Developer Sandbox (free tier) · with limits | $5,955 · Enterprise (AWS Marketplace 12-month contract) · with limits | $2,000 · $2000/mo · with limits |
Northflank: Northflank bills per second for the plan size you pick, with no monthly fee, until you pause the sandbox. Volumes cost $0.15 per GB a month even while paused, and outbound traffic costs $0.06 per GB.
Ona: New Core subscriptions are closed, so Ona's prices here use its Enterprise listing on AWS Marketplace: a 12-month, $60,000 contract, plus the compute on your own cloud bill. Real Enterprise prices are negotiated with sales.
Ona: Plans start at $20 a month, and the whole fee is usage credit spent per second while sandboxes run. A stopped sandbox costs nothing and keeps its whole disk.
Limits in those scenarios
On Northflank the limit that bites is what survives a pause: only attached volumes keep their files, and it does not publish how many sandboxes can run at once, so 300 or 1,000 at a time is not confirmed. On Ona a new customer can only buy Enterprise through sales, its concurrency limit is not published (the table assumes 3, as on its old free plan), and an idle environment stops after 30 minutes unless auto-stop is set to Never. On bochka the burst of 1,000 short jobs is queued, because starts above 90 a minute wait their turn.
| Scenario | Northflank | Ona | bochka |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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 Northflank when
you want self-serve sandboxes billed per second today, GPUs next to the agent, or regions outside Europe.
- Sign up and pay per second. For teams that want to start today: Northflank is self-serve, bills per second and has plans from a tenth of a vCPU.
- GPU sandboxes. For agents that train or run models: Northflank has GPU sandboxes from L4 and A100 up to H100.
- Regions and one platform. For teams with users far from Europe, or who want apps, databases and sandboxes on one platform, in many regions or their own cloud.
Use Ona when
your engineers want a governed cloud IDE shared with a Codex agent, inside your own AWS or GCP account.
- A full cloud IDE for your team. For engineers who work in the same environments as their agents: Ona has browser, VS Code and JetBrains IDEs with Dev Containers and prebuilds.
- Codex agent from your tools. For teams already on OpenAI: Ona's Codex Agent can start from chat, a Linear issue or an automation and open pull requests.
- Runs in your own cloud. For teams whose environments must stay in their own AWS or GCP account: Ona's Enterprise runners do that.
Where bochka fits
If what you are really running is coding agents started from your own code, look at bochka. Each one gets a full VM that keeps its whole disk, with the agent, a desktop and a browser already inside, on a self-serve plan. Northflank and Ona both win if you need GPUs or your own cloud account.
The whole machine comes back
Pausing a Northflank sandbox wipes everything outside attached volumes, which bill while paused. Ona keeps the disk, but it stays on your cloud bill, and Core archives it after 3 days. bochka keeps the whole disk and a stopped sandbox costs nothing.
Agents you drive from outside
Northflank Harnesses start the agent, but you reach it through a terminal or SSH. Ona manages only Codex, and its SDK needs an Enterprise contract. bochka lets you prompt, steer and follow seven preinstalled agents through one API on every plan.
A desktop, /dev/kvm and raw TCP
Both Northflank and Ona are headless and document no /dev/kvm, so computer-use agents and Android emulators need work you build yourself. Raw TCP needs a separate load balancer on Northflank and is not documented on Ona. bochka has all three built in.
Use bochka when your code starts and drives the agents, and each one needs a full VM that keeps its whole disk, with /dev/kvm, a desktop and open ports. Compare it one to one: bochka vs Northflank and bochka vs Ona.
Questions people ask
Is Northflank cheaper than Ona?
In every scenario we priced, yes: one agent running all month is $108 on Northflank against $5,140 on Ona, using Ona's Enterprise listing on AWS Marketplace. On bochka the same agent is $26 a month. Ona's real price is a sales quote, so yours may differ.
Which is faster, Northflank or Ona?
We cannot say: neither has a result on the CPU benchmark we use. bochka did 26.69 Node.js build-and-test runs per second at 4 vCPU / 8 GB.
Can Northflank and Ona run Docker?
Yes. Northflank sandboxes have their own kernel, so Docker can run inside, and Ona runs Docker with root inside the Dev Container. Neither documents /dev/kvm for Android emulators or VMs; bochka has it on every machine.
Is Ona the same as Gitpod?
Yes. Gitpod renamed itself Ona in 2025 and moved toward background coding agents, and Ona is now part of OpenAI.
Can I sign up for Ona or Northflank today?
Northflank is self-serve with per-second billing. Ona's billing docs say new Core subscriptions are no longer available, so new customers go through sales for Enterprise. bochka's plans are self-serve, from a free trial up.
Can I run Claude Code on Northflank or Ona?
Northflank Harnesses can start Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode or Pi, which you reach through a terminal or SSH. On Ona you install Claude Code yourself, since its managed agent is Codex. bochka preinstalls seven agents with an API to prompt, steer and follow them.
Try bochka
Install the CLI, then run bochka new.
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