Claude Agent SDK vs Strands Agents

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.	Strands Agents Open-source, model-driven SDK from AWS for building AI agents in a few lines of code.
Category	framework	framework
Vendor type	commercial	hybrid
Pricing	free	freemium
Strengths	+ First-class Claude features (prompt caching, extended thinking) + Designed around production agent patterns + Compatible with the Skills standard	+ Minimal, model-driven API that reduces orchestration boilerplate + Provider- and cloud-agnostic model support + Built-in observability via OpenTelemetry + Production deployment patterns for common AWS runtimes
Tradeoffs	− Claude-only (cross-provider needs a gateway like Portkey)	− Model-driven control can be less predictable than explicit graph flows − Smoothest experience and deployment docs skew toward AWS infrastructure
Used in stacks	9	0