OpenAI Agents SDK
Lightweight framework for building multi-agent workflows
OpenAI Agents SDK is profiled here as a Agentic Capabilities tool for engineering teams. Read about features, pricing, and how it compares to related options in the tools directory.
Description
The OpenAI Agents SDK is an open-source Python and TypeScript framework released by OpenAI in 2025 as the production successor to its Swarm experiment. It keeps the core small, with agents, handoffs, guardrails, and sessions as the main building blocks, so teams compose multi-agent systems without heavy abstractions. Built-in tracing visualizes each run, and the SDK works with any model that exposes a Chat Completions-style API. Its small surface area and built-in tracing made it a quick way to move multi-agent prototypes toward production. Sessions persist conversation history automatically, which removes a common piece of boilerplate from agent applications.
Key Capabilities:
Agents configured with instructions, tools, and structured outputs
Handoffs that delegate work between specialized agents
Input and output guardrails for validation and safety
Sessions that persist conversation history automatically
Built-in tracing for visualizing and debugging runs
Provider-agnostic model support under an MIT license
Alternative tools
- Composio
Tool integration and managed auth layer for AI agents
- Agno
High-performance framework for building and running agents
- smolagents
Lightweight agent library built around code-writing agents
- Browser Use
Connect AI agents to the browser for web tasks
- Letta
Build stateful agents with long-term memory
- Microsoft Agent Framework
Microsoft's unified SDK for agents and multi-agent workflows