DSPy vs OpenAI Agents SDK

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

	DSPy Open-source Python framework for programming, rather than prompting, language models.	OpenAI Agents SDK OpenAI's official SDK with handoffs, tools, guardrails, tracing.
Category	framework	framework
Vendor type	open source	commercial
Pricing	free	free
Strengths	+ Declarative, modular programs replace brittle prompt strings + Automatic prompt optimization against a defined metric + Portable across models and providers (uses LiteLLM under the hood) + Research-backed, with an active academic and OSS community	+ Deep integration with OpenAI features + Built-in handoff and guardrail primitives
Tradeoffs	− Optimizer-driven workflow has a distinct learning curve − Compilation and optimization can add cost and iteration time − Less of a turnkey agent runtime than orchestration-focused frameworks	− OpenAI-first; cross-provider use is awkward
Used in stacks	0	3