Burr (DAGWorks)
Burr is a state-machine framework for LLM agents from DAGWorks (commercial company behind Hamilton dataflow framework, $4M seed). State-machine abstraction instead of DAG / ReAct — more debuggable for production. Targets the same niche as LangGraph but with state-machine semantics rather than DAG. BSD-3 license. Founded 2023 by ex-Stitch Fix / Two Sigma / Lyft engineers.
At a glance
- Type
- OSS state-machine framework for LLM agents (DAGWorks Inc.)
- Tier
- T2
- Created
- 2023 (Burr initial release; DAGWorks founded 2022)
- Latest release
- not applicable — orchestration platform, not memory product
- License
- BSD-3-Clause
- Pricing
- OSS (free); commercial DAGWorks platform for Hamilton + Burr observability
- Funding
- $4M seed (2023; Skylab Capital, others)
Taxonomy
- storage
- none-trivial
- retrieval
- none
- persistence
- session-only
- update
- agent-controlled
- unit
- turn
- governance
- opaque
- conflict
- out-of-scope
When to use
Optimised for: production-grade state-machine LLM workflows with observability
Anti-fit: not applicable — orchestration platform, not memory product
Pros & cons
Pros
State-machine abstraction (vs DAG / ReAct) is genuinely more production-debuggable; companion to Hamilton (popular dataflow framework); strong founder pedigree.
Cons
Smaller stars / ecosystem than LangGraph / CrewAI; commercial sustainability of DAGWorks newer; state-machine framing has learning curve.
Claims & capabilities
OSS BSD-3 state-machine framework; sister project to Hamilton dataflow; founders ex-Stitch Fix / Two Sigma; $4M seed 2023; ~1.6k+ stars
Technical surface
- API surface
- not applicable — orchestration platform, not memory product
- Backend storage
- not applicable — orchestration platform, not memory product
- Deployment
- not applicable — orchestration platform, not memory product
- Embedding model
- not applicable — not a memory product
- Multi-tenancy
- not applicable — orchestration platform, not memory product
- MCP
- not applicable — orchestration platform, not memory product
- A2A
- not applicable — orchestration platform, not memory product
- OpenTelemetry
- not applicable — orchestration platform, not memory product
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Other multi-agent orchestration platforms in the catalog, ranked by inbound references.
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- CrewAI Enterprise T2
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- Lindy T2
Lindy is a no-code multi-agent automation platform from Florent Crivello (ex-Teleport, ex-Twitter). Targets consumer / SMB segment with email triage, meeting scheduling, CRM-update agents. $50M Series A Oct-2024 led by Andreessen Horowitz + Sequoia. Distinct from Zapier / n8n traditional automation by putting LLMs at the core of every workflow node.
- Microsoft AutoGen Studio T2
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Related systems
References (1)
- LangGraph (orchestration) depends on at runtime — adjacent-infrastructure cell: Hamilton (sister OSS framework, same company); LangGraph (closest competitor); MLflow / Phoenix observability