# boat vs OpenShip boat records 66,870 monthly visits with +520.8% month-over-month growth and Free Trial, Paid pricing. OpenShip records 23,815 monthly visits with +26.8% growth and Freemium, Paid, Contact for Pricing pricing. | Metric | [boat](https://openaitools.app/tool/boat) | [OpenShip](https://openaitools.app/tool/openship) | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | Website URL | https://boat.dev | https://openship.io | | Categories | AI Agent, AI Developer Tools, AI Workflow, AI API | AI Developer Tools, AI Agent, AI Workflow | | Pricing Model | Free Trial, Paid | Freemium, Paid, Contact for Pricing | | Monthly Visits | 66,870 | 23,815 | | MoM Growth Rate | +520.8% | +26.8% | | Primary Market | United States | United States | | Direct Visits | 37,777 | 11,538 | | Review Score | 4.6 | 4.6 | | Saved Count | 0 | 0 | | Supported Platforms | Website | Website | ## boat boat targets teams running many agents at once, which it calls "agent factories". Instead of containers that reset on every session, boat hands out full Linux virtual machines with a persistent disk, so installed packages, cloned repos, and saved files survive between runs. Pre-configured images ship with Docker, VS Code, Chrome, the GitHub CLI, Rust, Node.js, and Bun, and you can bring any harness such as Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode. The standout capability is disk-level forking. You can snapshot a configured sandbox and clone it in seconds to run dozens or hundreds of parallel agents from an identical starting state. Sandboxes can be paused and resumed, with disk snapshots taken every minute and again at each stop, so billing only accrues while the VM runs. This makes it practical to fan out test, build, and research workloads without paying for idle time. Billing is metered by the second against a monthly minimum, and the service advertises one of the lowest list prices for comparable VM hours, with sizes ranging from 2 vCPU to 16 vCPU. Sandboxes run in Germany, Finland, and France; there is no US or Asia region and no GPU option, so graphical work runs on the CPU. It is a strong fit for developers who want a real machine rather than a constrained execution sandbox. **Pricing & Plans:** Per-second billing with a $20/month minimum. The default 4 vCPU / 8 GB sandbox lists at $0.036/h, with smaller (2 vCPU / 4 GB) and larger (8 vCPU / 16 GB, 16 vCPU / 32 GB) sizes available. A 7-day free trial with a card provides 25 compute hours, and stopped sandboxes incur no compute charge while the disk is retained for at least 14 days. - **Persistent full Linux VMs:** Each sandbox is a complete Ubuntu machine with systemd, Docker, databases, and cron, so anything that runs on Linux runs here. - **Fast snapshot forking:** Clone a configured sandbox from a disk snapshot in seconds to launch large fleets of identical parallel agents. - **SSH, SCP, and virtual desktop:** Connect over SSH and SCP or open a 60fps virtual desktop and browser to inspect web apps, IDEs, and 3D scenes. - **API, CLI, and SDKs:** Drive everything programmatically through the boat CLI (with --json output), an HTTP API, or Python and TypeScript SDKs. - **Per-second metered billing:** Pay only while sandboxes run, with no compute charge when stopped and disks kept for at least 14 days. **Strengths:** Full Ubuntu VMs rather than restricted containers, with Docker and systemd included; Very fast disk-level forking makes large parallel agent runs affordable; Transparent per-second pricing with no compute charge while stopped **Limitations:** No GPU option and no US or Asia data regions; A $20 monthly minimum applies, which is wasteful for light or occasional use [Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/boat.md) ## OpenShip Openship sits in the space between a fully managed PaaS and a bare server you have to wire up yourself. You connect a repository, pick a branch and choose a destination: the shared Openship Cloud pool, a VPS or bare-metal machine you own, or a hybrid where sensitive workloads stay on your hardware while burst capacity runs in the cloud. The control plane is the same in all three cases, so you are not maintaining two different deployment stories. Beyond plain app hosting, it takes on the unglamorous infrastructure that usually eats a weekend: databases and private service connections, domain and TLS certificate management, secrets, scheduled jobs and webhook-driven automation, scheduled backups, and streaming logs and metrics per service. There is a catalog of around 52 ready-to-deploy templates spanning self-hosted Supabase, n8n, Ghost, PostgreSQL with pgAdmin, Nextcloud, Gitea, Umami, MinIO and similar tooling, plus a built-in transactional mail server with SPF, DKIM and DMARC handled for you. The licence is Apache 2.0 and self-hosting is free forever, which is the core of the pitch. If you would rather not run the control plane on your own box, Openship Cloud starts from $12 a month, and there is a native Mac, Windows and Linux desktop app plus an MCP server so an AI client can drive deploys. Because your apps are ordinary containers and your services are standard images, leaving is documented rather than locked in. **Pricing & Plans:** Open source under Apache 2.0 and free to self-host forever. Openship Cloud is a managed option starting from $12 per month on monthly or annual billing, with a hybrid mode that combines a cloud subscription with unlimited self-hosted boxes. - **Deploy to cloud or your own servers:** Ship the same project to fully managed Openship Cloud, to any Linux box you own, or a hybrid split, and move workloads between them later. - **Git-based delivery pipeline:** Connect a repository, pick a branch, review the detected framework and follow build output from image to a healthy running service. - **Databases and service connections:** Spin up PostgreSQL, Redis or S3-compatible object storage with private networking and bind them into the same project as your app. - **Domains, HTTPS and security:** Connect domains, verify DNS and let the platform manage TLS certificates and environment secrets for each project. - **Ops visibility you keep after launch:** Streaming logs, real-time metrics, scheduled backups, release history and one-click rollbacks stay attached to the project. **Strengths:** Apache 2.0 licence with genuinely free self-hosting and no billing on your own boxes; One control plane spanning managed cloud, your own servers and a hybrid of both; Broad built-in surface area: databases, mail server, TLS, backups, cron and MCP; Documented migration path between cloud and self-hosted, with plain containers as the exit route [Profile (Markdown)](https://openaitools.app/tool/openship.md) ## Frequently Asked Questions ### How do boat and OpenShip compare in monthly traffic? boat has 66,870 monthly visits, while OpenShip has 23,815. Traffic estimates describe audience size, not product quality. ### How do their growth rates compare? boat has a month-over-month growth rate of +520.8%; OpenShip has +26.8%. ### How does pricing compare? boat: Free Trial, Paid. Per-second billing with a $20/month minimum. The default 4 vCPU / 8 GB sandbox lists at $0.036/h, with smaller (2 vCPU / 4 GB) and larger (8 vCPU / 16 GB, 16 vCPU / 32 GB) sizes available. A 7-day free trial with a card provides 25 compute hours, and stopped sandboxes incur no compute charge while the disk is retained for at least 14 days. OpenShip: Freemium, Paid, Contact for Pricing. Open source under Apache 2.0 and free to self-host forever. Openship Cloud is a managed option starting from $12 per month on monthly or annual billing, with a hybrid mode that combines a cloud subscription with unlimited self-hosted boxes. ## Alternatives | # | Tool Name | Monthly Visits | MoM Growth Rate | Pricing Model | Summary | Profile (Markdown) | | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | | 1 | [RunPod](https://openaitools.app/tool/runpod) | 2,881,043 | +5.9% | Paid | The AI developer cloud for GPU pods, serverless inference and clustering | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/runpod.md) | | 2 | [Browser Use](https://openaitools.app/tool/browser-use) | 1,206,376 | +41.1% | Freemium, Paid, Contact for Pricing | Browser agents and stealth cloud browsers for real web tasks | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/browser-use.md) | | 3 | [Modal](https://openaitools.app/tool/modal-com) | 1,196,021 | +30.2% | Freemium, Contact for Pricing | Serverless cloud infrastructure for AI and data workloads | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/modal-com.md) | | 4 | [Mastra](https://openaitools.app/tool/mastra) | 318,954 | -5% | Freemium, Contact for Pricing | The TypeScript framework for building, deploying, and observing AI agents | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/mastra.md) | | 5 | [Browserbase](https://openaitools.app/tool/browserbase) | 283,597 | -8% | Freemium | Cloud browsers and web APIs for AI agents | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/browserbase.md) | | 6 | [Zeabur](https://openaitools.app/tool/zeabur) | 275,642 | -15.9% | Free Trial, Paid | AI DevOps engineer that deploys and scales your apps | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/zeabur.md) | | 7 | [Agent 37](https://openaitools.app/tool/agent-37) | 180,030 | +24.2% | Free Trial, Contact for Pricing | The low-cost cloud sandbox where AI agents actually live | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/agent-37.md) | | 8 | [Coder](https://openaitools.app/tool/coder) | 149,417 | -12.8% | Free Trial, Contact for Pricing, Free | Self-hosted cloud development environments and AI coding agents for enterprise teams | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/coder.md) | | 9 | [InsForge](https://openaitools.app/tool/insforge) | 60,257 | -11.3% | Freemium, Contact for Pricing, Free | Agent-native cloud infrastructure that lets coding agents run the whole backend stack | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/insforge.md) | | 10 | [exe.dev](https://openaitools.app/tool/exe-dev) | 60,103 | -26.4% | Freemium, Paid | Cloud Linux VMs built for developers and their AI agents | [.md](https://openaitools.app/tool/exe-dev.md) | --- Source: https://openaitools.app/compare/boat-vs-openship More Markdown: [Categories](https://openaitools.app/categories.md) · [Traffic rankings](https://openaitools.app/rankings.md) · [llms.txt](https://openaitools.app/llms.txt)