Comparison · updated June 2026

Daytona vs Dejima

These two get compared a lot, but they do different jobs. Daytona spins up fast, throwaway sandboxes to execute AI-generated code, driven by an SDK. Dejima runs a persistent fleet of coding agents on hardware you own, with a dashboard you watch and host access you control. Knowing which problem you have makes the choice easy.

Verified as of June 2026. Competitor products change quickly, so every claim here is dated and the sources are listed at the bottom of this page.

What Daytona is

Daytona is infrastructure for running AI-generated code. A sandbox boots in under 100 milliseconds, with its own kernel, filesystem, and network, and you create and destroy them programmatically from a Python or TypeScript SDK. It's the execution layer you'd reach for when an agent your product runs needs to actually run the code it just wrote.

Daytona runs the control plane as a managed service, while the sandboxes themselves execute on customer-managed compute in your own cloud (a bring-your-own-cloud data plane), billed by usage after a free credit. So your code can run on infrastructure you control, but you still depend on Daytona's managed control plane rather than running the whole stack yourself. Its dashboard, runner, and SDKs are public under AGPL-3.0 and you can self-host them, but that stack is frozen: as of June 2026 core development moved to a private codebase, with no further updates, fixes, or releases. Daytona raised a $24M Series A in February 2026.

What Dejima is

Dejima isn't a sandbox API. It's a self-hosted runtime where you run a fleet of coding agents on your own hardware and operate them from one place. See the overview.

Each project is an island, a persistent container with its own home and credentials. You attach to terminal agents like Claude Code and watch them work; the session survives a dropped connection and follows you to another device. Headless runtimes run alongside and stream to dejima logs. Host-file access is deny-all by default, granted folder by folder through a broker that writes every crossing to a tamper-evident log. It runs on a Mac mini or a single server, with no per-second cloud bill.

Side by side

Daytona's AGPL-3.0 stack (dashboard, runner, SDKs) is public and self-hostable but frozen: core development moved to a private codebase in June 2026, with no further updates. The live product is a managed control plane with a bring-your-own-cloud data plane (sandboxes on your own compute), usage-billed.

When Daytona is the better choice

Pick Daytona if code execution is the product. You're building an agent or an app that generates code and has to run it, you want sandboxes that appear and vanish in milliseconds, and you'd rather call an SDK than operate a box. Throughput and isolation of untrusted code are the whole game, and Daytona is built for it. Dejima isn't a code-execution API and won't pretend to be one.

When Dejima is the better choice

Pick Dejima if you're running agents, not executing snippets. You want Claude Code or Codex working on your repo, on your hardware, with sessions that stay alive while you step away. You want to see the whole fleet on one screen, grant host access deliberately, and read back an audit trail of what crossed. And you'd rather own the box than watch a per-second meter.

Common questions

Sources, last verified June 2026: daytona.io · daytonaio/daytona (AGPL-3.0 + the June 2026 "no longer maintained" notice). Competitor details change; tell us if something here is out of date.