OpenAI Agents SDK vs Claude Agent SDK
A side-by-side view of two listings from the BuildStack.ai AI agent harnesses directory, for software vendors and family-office technology buyers. Every value is copied from the listing data, verified (Asia/Singapore) from the sources linked below.
Summary
OpenAI Agents SDK and Claude Agent SDK are both listed in AI agent harnesses. Of the 5 capabilities compared there, both document 5: Multi-agent, Durable state / resume, Human-in-the-loop, Tracing / observability, MCP support.
Their capability marks are identical, so the differences are in languages, license, hosting and the vendor notes shown in the table below.
Best fit, as stated in each listing — OpenAI Agents SDK: Teams that want a small, opinionated agent loop with built-in tracing, and can add a durable-execution engine when runs get long. Claude Agent SDK: Teams building Claude-based coding or computer-use style agents who want Claude Code's tools and permission model inside their own app.
Side-by-side comparison
✔ = documented by the vendor · ✕ = not offered / vendor says no · ? = not verified. Values are shown exactly as stored in the listing.
| Field | OpenAI Agents SDK | Claude Agent SDK |
|---|---|---|
| Website | https://openai.github.io/openai-agents-python/ | https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview |
| Type | Open source | SDK (Anthropic Commercial Terms) |
| Languages / SDKs | Python, JavaScript/TypeScript | Python, TypeScript |
| License | MIT | Use governed by Anthropic Commercial Terms of Service (GitHub reports MIT for the Python repo) |
| Hosting model | Self-hosted library (runs in your process) | Self-hosted: the SDK supervises a Claude Code subprocess in your container/sandbox; Anthropic separately offers hosted Managed Agents |
| GitHub ★ | openai/openai-agents-python · ★ 30,144 (as of 2026-10-20) — Python repo; the JS/TS SDK (openai-agents-js) is separate. | anthropics/claude-agent-sdk-python · ★ 8,300 (as of 2026-10-20) — Python repo; the TypeScript SDK is a separate repo. |
| Multi-agent | ✔ | ✔ |
| Durable state / resume | ✔ | ✔ |
| Human-in-the-loop | ✔ | ✔ |
| Tracing / observability | ✔ | ✔ |
| MCP support | ✔ | ✔ |
| Description | Lightweight, provider-agnostic framework from OpenAI for multi-agent workflows built from agents, tools, handoffs, guardrails, sessions and tracing. | Anthropic's SDK that exposes the Claude Code agent loop, built-in tools, permissions, sessions and hooks to Python and TypeScript applications. |
| Best fit | Teams that want a small, opinionated agent loop with built-in tracing, and can add a durable-execution engine when runs get long. | Teams building Claude-based coding or computer-use style agents who want Claude Code's tools and permission model inside their own app. |
| Details | Handoffs let an agent delegate to another agent; tool-approval pause/resume for human-in-the-loop; sessions (SQLAlchemy, SQLite, Redis, MongoDB, Dapr, encrypted); durable long-running runs via documented Dapr, Temporal, Restate and DBOS integrations; built-in tracing; MCP and hosted tools; sandbox, realtime and voice agents. | Subagents; permission modes, rules and a canUseTool callback for approvals; hooks; sessions that can be resumed, forked and persisted to external storage (resume across hosts); file checkpointing/rewind; OpenTelemetry observability; external MCP servers and in-process SDK MCP servers for custom tools. |
Back to the category: AI agent harnesses · full comparison table · all comparisons
Sources
OpenAI Agents SDK sources
- https://github.com/openai/openai-agents-python
- https://openai.github.io/openai-agents-python/running_agents/
- https://openai.github.io/openai-agents-python/human_in_the_loop/
- https://openai.github.io/openai-agents-python/handoffs/
- https://openai.github.io/openai-agents-python/mcp/
- https://api.github.com/repos/openai/openai-agents-python
Claude Agent SDK sources
- https://github.com/anthropics/claude-agent-sdk-python
- https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview
- https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/subagents
- https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/permissions
- https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/sessions
- https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/hosting
- https://api.github.com/repos/anthropics/claude-agent-sdk-python
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This page is generated from the same listing data as the AI agent harnesses page; it adds no facts of its own. Capabilities are marked ✔ only when documented; “?” means we could not verify it, not that it is missing. Featured (paid) placement adds a Sponsored label only and never changes the facts or their order. Corrections: email the publisher.