The OpenAI Agents SDK is a library for building agents into your own app. Agent Swarm is a self-hosted operating swarm that runs recurring team work.
The real comparison is not which abstraction is nicer. It is whether you want to build an agent system or run a persistent agent team.
The OpenAI Agents SDK is a framework for building agent behaviour into your own Python or TypeScript application: agents, handoffs, guardrails, sessions, and tracing inside your codebase. Agent Swarm is a different layer: an open-source, self-hosted operating swarm where a lead agent takes work from Slack, repositories, issue trackers, email, or the API and delegates it to workers in isolated containers, with shared memory and schedules across sessions. Choose the SDK to build an agent app; choose Agent Swarm to run an agent team. Many teams use both.
The Agents SDK is a pip or npm package with a deliberately small set of primitives — agents, handoffs, and guardrails — plus a built-in loop that runs tools until the task is done. You own the architecture and ship agent features inside your Python or TypeScript codebase.
The SDK ships realtime agents built on gpt-realtime, with automatic interruption detection and streaming transport, plus voice pipelines that chain speech-to-text, an agent workflow, and text-to-speech. Guardrails and handoffs work in voice runs too. If spoken interaction is the requirement, OpenAI's own framework is the direct path.
Built-in tracing lets you visualize, debug, and monitor agent runs step by step, and connects directly to OpenAI's evaluation, fine-tuning, and distillation tools. When your quality loop already lives on OpenAI's platform, the instrumentation comes free with the framework instead of being another system to wire up.
The SDK is a library, not a platform: it runs inside your own process, from a laptop script to a serverless deployment. Agent Swarm is a running system — an API plus workers in isolated Docker containers — which is power you only pay for when you need a standing team.
Agent Swarm is an operating system for AI work: a lead agent receives goals from Slack, repositories, issue trackers, email, or the API, and delegates them to specialized workers such as Claude Code, Codex, pi, opencode, Devin, or ACP agents. You assign outcomes, not orchestration code.
Isolated containers, shared memory, tools, schedules, and review gates preserve work across sessions, so the swarm builds on prior decisions, codebase patterns, and failed approaches instead of starting cold on every run. Each new task starts with what the team has already learned.
Schedules, heartbeats, and workflows are built in, so follow-ups, checks, reports, and implementation loops run on a cadence while the team is offline, and the results wait in Slack or the dashboard. The SDK has no scheduler: your application triggers every run.
Agent Swarm is open source under the MIT License and self-hosted with docker compose or the OCI Helm chart: you pay for the infrastructure and inference providers you choose. Agent Swarm Cloud is the managed option when you want one.
A useful comparison says where each tool actually wins. agent-swarm.dev is for a persistent, owned operating team; the alternative wins when its shape fits your job better.
Agent Swarm is not something you import. If the outcome you want is agent logic embedded in your own Python or TypeScript application, the OpenAI Agents SDK is the right tool, and Agent Swarm does not replace it — that is framework work, and the SDK is purpose-built for it.
Self-hosting Agent Swarm means running an API, workers, containers, and a database, and owning upgrades and backups. The SDK adds no server footprint beyond the application you already run, so teams that do not need a standing swarm should not operate one.
An application built on the SDK can sit next to a swarm that maintains it: the swarm handles recurring reviews, issue triage, and release work around the repo, while the SDK powers the agent features inside the product. A swarm worker can also build and ship SDK-based code as one of its tasks.
Agent Swarm is open source under MIT and self-hosted: docker compose up, then hand it a real task from Slack, a repository, an issue tracker, email, or the API. Judge it against any framework on the same piece of work.
Only for some use cases, because the two solve different layers. The Agents SDK is a framework for building agent behaviour into your own application; Agent Swarm is a self-hosted operating swarm that runs recurring team work with a lead agent, workers, shared memory, and schedules. If you are building an app, choose the SDK. If you want a standing agent team, run Agent Swarm.
Yes. An application built on the SDK can sit next to a swarm that maintains it: the swarm runs recurring reviews, triage, and release work around the repository while the SDK powers agent features inside the product. A swarm worker can also write and ship SDK-based code as one of its assigned tasks.
Yes. Agent Swarm gives you your choice of harness and models: Claude Code, Codex, pi, opencode, Devin, or ACP agents can run as workers, and the docs describe Codex as OpenAI's coding agent with support for both API keys and ChatGPT OAuth. You pick the provider, the model, and the account each worker bills to.
No. OpenAI Swarm was OpenAI's experimental educational library for learning multi-agent orchestration, and the Agents SDK is its production-ready upgrade — OpenAI recommends the SDK for all production use cases. Agent Swarm is a different product entirely, built by Desplega Labs. For the full distinction, see OpenAI Swarm vs Agent Swarm.
Yes. The SDK's sessions persist a conversation's history across multiple agent runs, so an agent picks up prior turns without you shuttling state between runs by hand, and you choose the backend: SQLite, Redis, MongoDB, SQLAlchemy, Dapr, encrypted sessions, or OpenAI-hosted conversation state via the Conversations API. That history belongs to one conversation, while durable memory that compounds across an entire team's work over weeks is a different layer, and that is the layer Agent Swarm provides with shared memory across sessions.
Yes. The Agents SDK is MIT-licensed, with separate Python and TypeScript repositories, and the TypeScript version documents integrations for serverless and edge environments. Agent Swarm is also MIT-licensed. In both cases you can read the code you depend on and run it on infrastructure you control.
This page compares product categories and operating models from public product documentation and repositories. We do not claim the tools are interchangeable.
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