OpenAI Agents SDK vs Strands Agents

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

	OpenAI Agents SDK OpenAI's official SDK with handoffs, tools, guardrails, tracing.	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	+ Deep integration with OpenAI features + Built-in handoff and guardrail primitives	+ 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	− OpenAI-first; cross-provider use is awkward	− Model-driven control can be less predictable than explicit graph flows − Smoothest experience and deployment docs skew toward AWS infrastructure
Used in stacks	3	0