OpenAI Agents SDK Alternatives

OpenAI Agents SDK alternatives in detail

1. AutoGen (AG2)

   open sourceMITSDK

   AutoGen pioneered the conversational multi-agent pattern: agents (and humans) collaborate by passing messages, including group chats and a code-executing agent. It originated at Microsoft Research; AG2 is the community-driven fork that continues that lineage. Both are open source.

   Read: Which Agent Framework in 2026? LangGraph vs CrewAI vs AutoGen vs OpenAI Agents SDK vs Claude Agent SDK

2. CrewAI

   open sourceMITSDK

   CrewAI orchestrates multiple agents as a 'crew' with roles, goals, and tasks — a high-level, fast-to-start abstraction for collaborative multi-agent work. It also offers Flows for event-driven, more deterministic control when you need it. Standalone and independent of LangChain.

   Read: LangGraph vs CrewAI: Agent Frameworks Compared (2026)

   Read: Which Agent Framework in 2026? LangGraph vs CrewAI vs AutoGen vs OpenAI Agents SDK vs Claude Agent SDK

3. LangGraph

   open sourceMITSDK

   LangGraph models an agent as an explicit state graph of nodes and edges, trading some abstraction for control. Its built-in persistence (checkpointing), human-in-the-loop interrupts, and streaming make it a common choice for production agents that need to be debuggable and resumable.

   Read: LangGraph vs CrewAI: Agent Frameworks Compared (2026)

   Read: OpenAI Agents SDK vs LangGraph: Minimal vs Controllable (2026)

   Read: Which Agent Framework in 2026? LangGraph vs CrewAI vs AutoGen vs OpenAI Agents SDK vs Claude Agent SDK

4. Claude Agent SDK

   freeSDK

   The Claude Agent SDK is a toolkit for building custom AI agents on the same harness that powers Claude Code. Official Python and TypeScript SDKs expose the core agent loop — reading files, running commands, calling tools, iterating on feedback — as a programmable library, with MCP support, configurable permissions, streaming, and multi-turn sessions.

   Read: Which Agent Framework in 2026? LangGraph vs CrewAI vs AutoGen vs OpenAI Agents SDK vs Claude Agent SDK

5. Google ADK

   open sourceApache-2.0SDK

   Google ADK (Agent Development Kit) is an open-source, code-first framework for building, evaluating, and deploying AI agents in Python (Java also available). It's model-agnostic and deployment-agnostic — run agents locally, on Cloud Run, or in Vertex AI Agent Engine, which it powers.

6. Langchain

   open sourceMITmacOS, Windows, LinuxSDK

   LangChain 1.0 (October 2025) answered its own bloat discourse by shrinking: the framework now centers on create_agent — a standard tool-calling loop running on the LangGraph runtime — plus middleware hooks and normalized content blocks across providers. Legacy chains moved to langchain-classic. MIT, Python and JS; LangSmith is the commercial layer.

7. Mastra

   open sourceApache-2.0 (core; ee/ commercial)SDK

   Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework for building AI agents, workflows, RAG, and tool-calling, from the team behind Gatsby. It targets JavaScript/TypeScript engineers who want typed agents, graph-based workflows, memory, and observability in one stack instead of dropping to Python.

8. Pydantic AI

   open sourceMITmacOS, Windows, LinuxSDK

   Pydantic AI (MIT, ~18k stars, v1 GA September 2025) brings the Pydantic team's type discipline to agents: outputs validated against your models so errors move from runtime to write-time, type-safe dependency injection for tools, the broadest model-agnostic provider list, durable execution via Temporal/DBOS/Prefect/Restate, and MCP/A2A interop.

   Read: OpenAI Agents SDK vs LangGraph: Minimal vs Controllable (2026)