Beam vs ModalSandbox Benchmark Comparison
Beam was faster in both shared sandbox benchmarks.
- Shared benchmarks
- 2
- Last run
- October 30, 2026
Scorecard
Median of each benchmark's primary metric; lower is better. Medians within 5% count as roughly even, and a benchmark gets no speed verdict when either provider completed fewer than 50% of runs.
Burst TTI
Run October 30, 2026Time from sandbox creation to the first successful command, with 100 sandboxes launched at the same time.
Time to interactive
Beam had a 1.37x lower median time to interactive (548ms vs 751ms for Modal).
Median time to interactive over time
30 runs from July 3, 2026 to October 30, 2026.
DAX
Run October 30, 2026A real developer workload: install system packages, download Bun, clone the opencode repo, then run bun install and bun typecheck.
Total workload time
Beam had a 1.10x lower median total workload time (96.13s vs 105.55s for Modal).
Median total workload time over time
8 runs from September 16, 2026 to October 30, 2026.
Cost per DAX run
Each provider's DAX median total workload time (run October 30, 2026) multiplied by its published rate at the 8 vCPU / 16 GiB benchmark spec. Workload time excludes sandbox create and destroy, and subscription floors and included credits are not modeled.
Beam
Per-second wall clock$0.0000375/core-s (1 core = 2 vCPU, so 4 cores) + $0.0000064/GiB-s.
Source pricing pageModal
Per-second, max(request, actual)Sandbox rate $0.00003942/core-s (4 cores = 8 vCPU) + $0.00000667/GiB-s. Regional multipliers (1.25–2.5x) not included.
Source pricing pageMethodology
- One workload, every provider. The same script, payload, and model hit every provider, addressed the way its own API expects. Nobody gets a tuned or special path.
- Repeated on a schedule. Every suite runs many iterations per provider, automated on a recurring schedule, so results reflect steady state rather than one lucky request.
- Raw results published. Every run is committed as JSON to the public benchmarks repo, next to the code that produced it. Nothing is cherry-picked or held back.
- How this comparison is built. Each benchmark compares the two providers' medians; results within 5% count as roughly even. A comparison is published only when both providers completed at least 50% of runs in 2 or more shared benchmarks run in the last 30 days.
Frequently asked questions
Have another question? Email us.
Beam was faster in both shared sandbox benchmarks. In Burst TTI (October 30, 2026), Beam had a median time to interactive of 548ms versus 751ms for Modal, 1.37x faster. In DAX (October 30, 2026), Beam had a median total workload time of 96.13s versus 105.55s for Modal, 1.10x faster.