Claude Agent SDK vs smolagents

Pick two tools from the same category to compare side-by-side.

	Claude Agent SDK Anthropic's official SDK for building production agents on Claude.	smolagents Hugging Face's minimalist agent library where agents act by writing and running code.
Category	framework	framework
Vendor type	commercial	open source
Pricing	free	free
Strengths	+ First-class Claude features (prompt caching, extended thinking) + Designed around production agent patterns + Compatible with the Skills standard	+ Minimal, readable codebase with few abstractions + Code-agent approach can reduce steps and LLM calls + Model-agnostic via LiteLLM and the Hub + Sandboxed execution options (E2B, Modal, Docker)
Tradeoffs	− Claude-only (cross-provider needs a gateway like Portkey)	− Minimalism means fewer built-in features for complex orchestration − Executing model-written code requires careful sandboxing − Younger, smaller ecosystem than larger frameworks
Used in stacks	9	0