Agno vs OpenAI Agents SDK
The OpenAI Agents SDK is a small, well-designed library, and inside the OpenAI platform it is the natural choice. A library, though, hands you the loop and leaves the service around it to you. Agno covers the same primitives, remains indifferent to your choice of model and supplies the service: a runtime, crash recovery, approvals and tracing that never leaves your system.
Facts checked against the OpenAI Agents SDK docs on 2026-08-10
Side by side
| OpenAI Agents SDK | Agno | |
|---|---|---|
| What you write | Agents with handoffs, guardrails and sessions. A minimal, code-first loop. | Agents, teams and workflows in plain Python. |
| Models | OpenAI models are the paved road. Other providers go through beta adapters with documented gaps. | Model-agnostic by design. Switch providers without rewriting your agents. |
| Tracing | Traces go to OpenAI servers by default. Zero Data Retention orgs get no tracing at all. | Tracing lives in your AgentOS, on your infrastructure. Nothing leaves. |
| Durability | It is a library. Crash recovery and long-running work come from third parties like Temporal. | Checkpointing, crash recovery and a durable job queue are built in. Runs resume in place, and background jobs survive restarts and deploys. |
| Streaming | A dropped connection ends the stream. | Streams are resumable. Reconnect with the last event index and catch up where you left off. |
| Approvals | Human-in-the-loop hooks exist. The inbox, the approver identity and the access rules are yours to build. | Included by default. Pending approvals persist, admins resolve them by scope, and the requester cannot approve their own run. |
| Runtime | You build and host the service yourself. | AgentOS is the service. One command, your cloud, your database, your auth. |
| Maturity | Pre-1.0 and moving fast, with releases most weeks. | Stable 2.x, with every release on our releases page. |
| License | MIT. | Apache 2.0 for the SDK and AgentOS. |
What OpenAI Agents SDK does well
The loop is small and well documented. You can read all of it in an afternoon.
Handoffs between agents are simple and work well.
Inside the OpenAI platform the integration is deep: hosted tools, traces, realtime and voice agents.
Session storage has many backends, from SQLite to Redis to Dapr.
Choose OpenAI Agents SDK when
You are committed to OpenAI models and want the deepest platform integration.
You want the smallest possible library and are prepared to build the service around it.
You need realtime or voice agents on the OpenAI stack today.
Choose Agno when
You want to pick your model provider freely, now and later.
You want crash recovery, a durable job queue and approvals without wiring third parties together.
You want a runtime and a control plane without building them yourself.
Sources
Every claim on this page was checked against the documentation linked below. The performance figures come from our public harness, and the benchmarks page shows how to run it. If something here has gone stale, tell us and we will correct it.