ARCHIL
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Archil vs Blaxel

Pick Blaxel for sandboxes that go to standby seconds after idling, wake with memory and processes intact, and can wait indefinitely. Pick Archil when many sandboxes must write the same disk, branch it in milliseconds or keep files in your own bucket; Blaxel volumes attach to one sandbox, and its shared Agent Drive is in private preview in one region.

Where Archil stands out

  • Storage many sandboxes write

    One disk mounts read-write everywhere; Blaxel volumes attach to one sandbox at a time.

  • A durable sandbox filesystem

    An Archil sandbox's root is a durable disk; Blaxel's is in memory and erased on delete.

  • Your own bucket

    Disks sync to S3, GCS or R2 as ordinary objects; Blaxel volumes can't use external storage.

Archil and Blaxel, side by side

What it is
Archil: Persistent disks (POSIX and S3 API) plus Firecracker sandboxes on a disk
Blaxel: Sandboxes, jobs and agent hosting on microVMs, with Volumes and Agent Drive
When compute stops
Archil: Disks kept; pause keeps memory
Blaxel: Standby in about 15 s keeps memory and files; delete erases the local filesystem
Sandbox filesystem
Archil: A durable Archil disk
Blaxel: In memory, about half the allocation; not replicated
One store shared by many sandboxes
Archil: Yes, read-write
Blaxel: Volumes: one sandbox; Agent Drive: many, private preview
Snapshots and forks
Archil: Checkpoint 13 ms, branch 33 ms (p50), any size
Blaxel: Memory and file snapshots and forks, private preview
Your own bucket
Archil: Two-way sync with S3, GCS, R2 or S3-compatible
Blaxel: Not for volumes
Read data from outside
Archil: S3-compatible API and SDKs
Blaxel: Agent Drive S3 endpoint; volumes only from a sandbox or agent
Billing model
Archil: Active storage per GiB-month; sandbox CPU and memory per hour
Blaxel: Active time by memory; snapshots, images and provisioned volumes per GB-month

Where the data lives

Blaxel Volume
BlaxelsandboxBlaxelsandboxBlaxelsandboxBlaxel Volumeblock storage, provisioned sizeread-writecan't attach

A Volume attaches to one sandbox at a time. Shared Agent Drive is in private preview.

Archil disk
BlaxelsandboxArchilsandboxAny LinuxserverArchil diskyour bucket or Archil-managedS3APIread-write from any provider · syncs to your bucket

Mounts read-write anywhere, outlives every sandbox, and is also an S3 bucket.

Measured

Blaxel's terms of service don't permit publishing benchmarks of its platform, so this page has none.

How they differ

Architecture

Blaxel has SDKs in Python, TypeScript and Go. The in-memory sandbox filesystem is fast but uses the memory allocation. Volumes are block storage of a provisioned size; Agent Drive is a distributed file system over Blaxel's FUSE client.

An Archil disk is an elastic POSIX file system, mounted over FUSE anywhere and reachable over S3. Archil sandboxes keep their files on a disk, not in memory.

Data durability and persistence

Blaxel sandboxes wake on the next request and aren't deleted without an expiration policy, though lower quota tiers cap lifetimes at 7 or 30 days. Blaxel calls the sandbox filesystem not replicated or durable.

An Archil write is durable when fsync returns, designed for 99.999% durability across Availability Zones. Deleting a sandbox leaves its disks untouched.

Sharing and branching

A sandbox can have one volume. Agent Drive mounts read-write or read-only in many sandboxes, only in us-was-1, and not yet on the infrastructure that provides snapshots and forks.

Archil uses shared or conditional mode for up to 5,000 clients, and branches mount anywhere as independent disks.

Bucket access and data format

How Agent Drive stores data isn't documented.

On a disk synced to your bucket, each file is an ordinary object at its path that stays if you leave Archil. Every disk is also an S3-compatible bucket, strongly consistent with the file system.

Pricing model

Blaxel: active time by allocated memory, CPU included, suspended time free; standby billed as snapshot storage, volumes on provisioned size, Agent Drive on data and operations. See Blaxel pricing.

Archil: active data per GiB-month with a lower archive rate, nothing to provision, sandboxes per vCPU-hour and GiB-hour. See Archil pricing.

Using them together

Mounting other FUSE file systems in Blaxel isn't documented. Sandbox code can still use an Archil disk over its S3 API or the SDKs.

Which one should you use?

Use Blaxel when

  • sandboxes that sleep in seconds and resume with memory
  • agents, jobs and sandboxes on one platform
  • state that fits in memory or one attached volume

Use Archil when

  • many writers on generally available shared storage
  • each attempt needs its own branch, in milliseconds
  • data in your own bucket as ordinary objects
  • storage that grows with the data

Questions people ask

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