These tools integrates with
OpenAI Agents SDKvsOpenAI API
Production-grade multi-agent orchestration from OpenAI versus GPT-5 era models, embeddings, and Responses API from OpenAI
Compare interactively in Explore →Choose OpenAI Agents SDK when…
- •You're building multi-agent systems on top of OpenAI models
- •You want explicit, auditable agent handoffs with full context passing
- •You need a production-hardened framework with built-in tracing and guardrails
Choose OpenAI API when…
- •You need the broadest ecosystem and most integrations
- •GPT-4 or o-series reasoning models are required
- •Assistants API, fine-tuning, or batch API are needed
Side-by-side comparison
Field
OpenAI Agents SDK
OpenAI API
Category
Agent Frameworks
LLM Infrastructure
Type
Open Source
Commercial
Free Tier
✓ Yes
✗ No
Pricing Plans
—
API: Per token
GitHub Stars
⭐ 12,000
—
Health
●100 — Active
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OpenAI Agents SDK
OpenAI's production-grade agent framework, successor to Swarm. Core abstraction is explicit handoffs between agents carrying full context. Built for reliable multi-agent pipelines with native OpenAI tool use, tracing, and guardrails.
OpenAI API
API access to GPT-5, GPT-5.5, o3/o4 reasoning models, and the Responses API; plus embeddings, image, audio, and Realtime endpoints. The most widely deployed LLM API in production.
Shared Connections1 tools both integrate with
Only OpenAI Agents SDK (6)
OpenAI APILangGraphGoogle Agent Development KitStrands AgentsMicrosoft Agent FrameworkClaude Agent SDK
Only OpenAI API (38)
AutoGenLlamaIndexLangChainPydanticAIsmolagentsAgnoMastraLiteLLMPortKeyLangfuse
Explore the full AI landscape
See how OpenAI Agents SDK and OpenAI API fit into the bigger picture — 235 tools, 543 relationships, all mapped.