Cloudflare vs ModalSandbox Benchmark Comparison
Modal was faster in 1 of 2 shared sandbox benchmarks, and 1 was roughly even.
- 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
The medians are within 5% of each other (779ms vs 751ms), so this counts as roughly even.
Median time to interactive over time
131 runs from March 13, 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
Modal had a 1.80x lower median total workload time (105.55s vs 189.88s for Cloudflare).
Median total workload time over time
3 runs from October 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.
Cloudflare
Active CPU + provisioned memory$0.000020/vCPU-s active-CPU + $0.0000025/GiB-s provisioned memory. CPU upper bound at 100% utilization. Requires $5/mo Workers Paid plan.
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
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Modal was faster in 1 of 2 shared sandbox benchmarks, and 1 was roughly even. In Burst TTI (October 30, 2026), Cloudflare had a median time to interactive of 779ms and Modal 751ms, which counts as roughly even. In DAX (October 30, 2026), Modal had a median total workload time of 105.55s versus 189.88s for Cloudflare, 1.80x faster.