Claude Agent SDK alternatives

Anthropic's SDK for building agents on the Claude Code agent loop (tools, sub-agents, MCP); published to PyPI as claude-agent-sdk. Full Claude Agent SDK record →

  1. 1 LangChain (framework) Agent frameworks (no first-party memory layer)

    also in Agent frameworks (no first-party memory layer) · also open source · also self-hostable · also has MCP

    OSS ✓ Self-host ✓ Managed ✓ MCP ✓ ★ 149k released 2026-10-21 MIT (OSS framework) Compare with Claude Agent SDK →

  2. 2 Cline (framework) Agent frameworks (no first-party memory layer)

    also in Agent frameworks (no first-party memory layer) · also open source · also self-hostable · also has MCP

    OSS ✓ Self-host ✓ Managed ✓ MCP ✓ ★ 68k Apache-2.0 Compare with Claude Agent SDK →

  3. 3 CrewAI Agent frameworks (no first-party memory layer)

    also in Agent frameworks (no first-party memory layer) · also open source · also self-hostable · also has MCP

    OSS ✓ Self-host ✓ Managed ✓ MCP ✓ ★ 59k released 2026-10-24 MIT Compare with Claude Agent SDK →

  4. 4 LlamaIndex (framework) Agent frameworks (no first-party memory layer)

    also in Agent frameworks (no first-party memory layer) · also open source · also self-hostable · also has MCP

    OSS ✓ Self-host ✓ Managed ✓ MCP ✓ ★ 53k released 2026-09-21 MIT Compare with Claude Agent SDK →

  5. 5 LangGraph (orchestration) Agent frameworks (no first-party memory layer)

    also in Agent frameworks (no first-party memory layer) · also open source · also self-hostable · also has MCP

    OSS ✓ Self-host ✓ Managed ✓ MCP ✓ ★ 44k released 2026-10-26 MIT Compare with Claude Agent SDK →

  6. 6 Vercel AI SDK Agent frameworks (no first-party memory layer)

    also in Agent frameworks (no first-party memory layer) · also open source · also self-hostable · also has MCP

    OSS ✓ Self-host ✓ Managed ✓ MCP ✓ ★ 28k released 2026-10-26 Apache-2.0 Compare with Claude Agent SDK →

  7. 7 Haystack (framework) Agent frameworks (no first-party memory layer)

    also in Agent frameworks (no first-party memory layer) · also open source · also self-hostable · also has MCP

    OSS ✓ Self-host ✓ Managed ✓ MCP ✓ ★ 27k released 2026-10-21 Apache-2.0 Compare with Claude Agent SDK →

  8. 8 Model Context Protocol (MCP spec) Agent frameworks (no first-party memory layer)

    also in Agent frameworks (no first-party memory layer) · also open source · also self-hostable · also has MCP

    OSS ✓ Self-host ✓ Managed ? MCP ✓ ★ 9.5k released 2026-10-23 Apache-2.0 (new spec and code contributions… Compare with Claude Agent SDK →

Ranked by shared memory design (storage, retrieval, conflict handling, memory unit), same section and shared must-haves (open source, self-hosting, MCP), with adoption as a tie-breaker. ✓ confirmed · — no · ? not in the catalog yet. Want picks for your own requirements? Use the chooser. Checking a whole project? Check your stack.