Summary
In summary, Agency Swarm is the only framework that has:No Predefined Prompts
It doesn’t write prompts for you, giving you full control over agent behavior.
Automatic Error Correction
Prevents hallucinations with automatic type checking and error correction.
Uniform Communication Flows
Allows you to define communication flows in any way you want.
Detailed Comparison
Here’s how Agency Swarm compares to 2 other most popular multi-agent frameworks.| Criteria | Agency Swarm | AutoGen | CrewAI |
|---|---|---|---|
| Origins | ✅ Originated from a real AI agency building AI agents for clients worldwide. | ✅ Originated as a research experiment. | ❌ Originated as a funding vehicle, rather than a real production framework. |
| Design & Architecture | ✅ Super lightweight framework with minimal abstractions. Built on top of the OpenAI Assistants and Responses API. | ✅ Event-driven architecture with support for both ChatCompletions, Assistants and Responses API. | ❌ Lacks a clear architectural design. Built on top of LangChain with numerous unnecessary abstractions. |
| Reliability | ✅ Robust type checking and validation for all tools with Pydantic. Input and output validation with agent’s guardrails system | ❌ Type hints but no validation. | ❌ Some validation is possible when using BaseTool, although the interface is not convenient to use. |
| Flexibility | ✅ No predefined prompts. Uniform communication. | ✅ Contains overridable predefined prompts. Customizable communication via GroupChat (model/custom speaker selection). | ❌ Numerous predefined prompts. Flows add conditional routing; customization remains limited. |
| Scalability | ✅ Easily scalable. Adding another agent only requires passing it to the Agency class. | ⚠️ Simple to add agents; complex graphs need custom orchestration. | ⚠️ Easy to add agents; Flows enable conditional orchestration, but customization is limited. |
| Deployability | ✅ Easily deployable with special callback functions. Offers open-source templates and tutorials. | ⚠️ Studio for build/debug; production requires self-hosted SDK deployment. | ❌ Deployment via enterprise platform. No open-source deployment guides. |
| Open Source Model Support | ✅ Supports over a dozen models through LiteLLM SDK. | ✅ Moderate open-source model support. | ✅ Full open-source model support. |
If you want to challenge any of these claims, or if some of the issues disappear as frameworks mature, please open an issue on GitHub.
Summary
- Agency Swarm - best for real business-oriented use cases.
- AutoGen - best for research, experimentation and novel AI applications.
- CrewAI - best for local development and playgrounds with open-source models.