OpenAI Agents SDK
OpenAI's small-footprint framework for agents, handoffs and guardrails in code
Overview
The OpenAI Agents SDK is OpenAI's free, MIT-licensed framework for agent applications in Python and TypeScript, launched in March 2025 as the successor to Swarm. A small core of agents, handoffs and guardrails with built-in tracing is extended by sessions, MCP tools, human-in-the-loop, voice and sandbox agents. OpenAI recommends it for teams leaving Agent Builder, which shuts on 30 November 2026.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 12 Oct 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
What you can produce with OpenAI Agents SDK
- Agents with instructions, tools, guardrails and handoffs, run by a managed loop
- Multi-agent delegation through handoffs or agents-as-tools
- Built-in tracing of every run
- Sessions that persist conversation memory in SQLite, Redis, SQLAlchemy, MongoDB and more
- Voice pipelines and realtime voice agents
- Sandbox agents that work on files inside an isolated container
- Python and JavaScript/TypeScript SDKs
The Agents SDK is the straightforward choice for teams building on OpenAI models in code: a small set of primitives, built-in tracing, and a runtime that manages turns, tools, handoffs and sessions so you do not write the loop yourself. Voice, realtime and sandboxed agents are first-party additions.
It is still pre-1.0, so expect interface changes, and non-OpenAI models run through adapters the docs label best-effort beta. With Agent Builder closing on 30 November 2026, it is also the migration route OpenAI recommends.
What we found
The OpenAI Agents SDK is OpenAI's open-source, MIT-licensed framework for building agent applications in code. It launched in Python on 11 March 2025, alongside the Responses API, as a production-ready successor to OpenAI's experimental Swarm project. A JavaScript and TypeScript version followed in June 2025 and runs on Node.js 22, Deno, Bun and Cloudflare Workers. The Python package reached version 0.23.1 on 2 October 2026, so it is still pre-1.0 and its interfaces can move between releases.
The design is deliberately small. Agents are models with instructions and tools; they can hand work to other agents or call them as tools; guardrails validate inputs and outputs; and built-in tracing records each run. Around that core the SDK has added sessions for conversation memory, human-in-the-loop checkpoints, MCP tool calling, voice pipelines, realtime voice agents and sandbox agents that work inside an isolated container.
It uses OpenAI's Responses API by default, and the documentation is candid about when you do not need it: if you want to own the loop and state yourself, call the Responses API directly. Other models work through any OpenAI-compatible endpoint or through LiteLLM and Any-LLM adapters, which the docs call best-effort beta integrations, so earlier versions of this page overstated how provider-agnostic it is in practice.
Its place in OpenAI's line-up has firmed. In a June 2026 update to the AgentKit announcement, OpenAI said it is winding down Agent Builder and Evals, which stop being available on 30 November 2026, and recommends the Agents SDK for workflows that should continue as code. Teams that built in Agent Builder have a migration to plan.
The SDK itself is free; you pay for model usage. Tracing goes to OpenAI's dashboard by default, so the docs tell teams without an OpenAI API key to disable it or plug in a different trace processor.
Compiled by RECATOOLS from public sources: vendor documentation and pricing, code repositories and published reporting.
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including OpenAI Agents SDK's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with OpenAI Agents SDK unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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