# OpenAI Agents SDK

> OpenAI's lightweight Python framework for building agents with tools, handoffs, guardrails, sessions and tracing

Source: https://dontaskagain.com/openai-agents-sdk
Website: https://openai.github.io/openai-agents-python/?utm_source=dontaskagain
Pricing: Free
Categories: [Agent frameworks](https://dontaskagain.com/categories/agent-frameworks.md), [Open source](https://dontaskagain.com/categories/open-source.md)
Listed: 2026-10-19
Updated: 2026-10-19

The OpenAI Agents SDK is an open-source framework for building agentic applications from a small set of primitives. Agents are LLMs with instructions and tools that run in a built-in loop until the task is complete, and they can hand work to other agents; it is the production successor to OpenAI's experimental Swarm project.

**Key features:**

- Delegate between agents with handoffs or call agents as tools.
- Validate inputs and outputs with guardrails that run in parallel and fail fast.
- Turn any Python function into a tool with automatic schema generation and Pydantic validation.
- Call remote MCP server tools alongside function tools.
- Keep conversation memory with sessions and run specialists in isolated sandbox workspaces.
- Build realtime and voice agents with speech-to-text and text-to-speech pipelines.
- Visualize, debug and evaluate runs with built-in tracing.

The SDK is Python-first, installed from PyPI under the MIT license, with a separate TypeScript version. It is free to use; model calls are billed through the chosen provider's API.

## More agent frameworks

- [Browser Use](https://dontaskagain.com/browser-use.md): Open-source browser agent and cloud browsers that complete web tasks like form filling, checkout and data extraction
- [Stagehand](https://dontaskagain.com/stagehand.md): Open-source SDK for building browser agents with Playwright-style APIs plus natural-language act, observe and extract
- [LangGraph](https://dontaskagain.com/langgraph.md): Open-source, low-level orchestration framework and runtime for building stateful, controllable agents
- [CrewAI](https://dontaskagain.com/crewai.md): Multi-agent framework and enterprise platform for building, running and governing teams of role-based agents
- [Mastra](https://dontaskagain.com/mastra.md): Open-source TypeScript framework for building agents and workflows with memory, evals and observability
- [Pydantic AI](https://dontaskagain.com/pydantic-ai.md): Type-safe Python agent framework from the Pydantic team with model-agnostic agents, tools and evals
- [Agno](https://dontaskagain.com/agno.md): Open-source agent framework and self-hosted runtime for building agents, teams and workflows in your own cloud
- [LlamaIndex](https://dontaskagain.com/llamaindex.md): Document parsing and extraction platform (LlamaParse) plus the open-source LlamaIndex framework for document agents
- [AI SDK](https://dontaskagain.com/ai-sdk.md): Open-source TypeScript toolkit from Vercel for building AI apps and agents with streaming and multi-model support
- [Letta](https://dontaskagain.com/letta.md): Research lab behind MemGPT building stateful agents with persistent, self-improving memory