Hey folks! I’ve been working with AI agent frameworks for several months now and have hands-on experience with multiple options like LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, PydanticAI, Agno, and OpenAI Swarm. I’m trying to figure out which framework works best in different situations.
I know everyone says “it depends on your use case” but I’m hoping we can have a real discussion about what you’ve actually used and liked. From what I’ve learned so far, AutoGen seems super beginner-friendly and quick to get running, but it doesn’t scale well or give you much flexibility when you need custom solutions. LangGraph is the opposite - harder to learn at first but way more powerful once you get the hang of it.
What has your experience been with these frameworks? Which ones have you found most reliable for production work? I’d love to hear some real-world comparisons from people who have actually built things with them. Thanks everyone!
langgraph’s my go-to for complex stuff. yeah, there’s a learning curve, but once you get state management, it’s super flexible. i’ve built financial analysis agents with tons of branching logic and it handles it perfectly. the new studio visualization makes debugging way easier too. autogen feels too rigid for real projects.
I’ve shipped production systems with all three - here’s what actually worked.
CrewAI surprised me most. Been using it for document processing for 8 months and the multi-agent coordination works way better than expected. The role-based setup makes it dead simple to figure out what each agent does. Zero problems scaling to thousands of documents daily.
PydanticAI’s solid if you’re already using Pydantic heavily. We built customer support automation with it and the type safety caught tons of runtime errors before they happened. Plugged right into our existing FastAPI services.
OpenAI Swarm feels like a research project, not production-ready. Played with it for weeks but never felt comfortable deploying anything critical. Clean API design though.
For production, I pick whatever gives me the best debugging when stuff breaks. CrewAI wins here - agent interactions are transparent and you can actually trace failed workflows.
What are you building? That’d help me give a better recommendation.
I’ve been running CrewAI in production for 8 months - it hits a sweet spot between easy to use and customizable. The role-based setup makes sense when you’re building workflows that act like real teams, which works great for complex multi-step stuff. Docs aren’t amazing, but once you get the crew/agent/task concept, spinning up new workflows is pretty easy. Performance has been solid for us, though we hit memory issues with large crews carrying heavy context. PydanticAI looks interesting for the type safety, but I haven’t used it enough in production to compare fairly. Honestly, picking a framework usually comes down to how comfortable your team is with Python and whether you want to focus on infrastructure or business logic.
Been using Agno for six months - it’s seriously underrated. Handles async operations way better than most frameworks I’ve tried, which is huge when you’re juggling multiple API calls or database ops. Memory management is solid too - no context bloat issues like other frameworks get during long conversations. Documentation sucks, but the core architecture is clean and predictable. Love how it handles error recovery - agents bounce back from failed operations instead of crashing the whole workflow. Rock solid in production with moderate traffic. Not flashy like other options, but it works without surprises.
Great breakdown of frameworks here — thanks for sharing your hands-on experiences!
If you’re trying to move past comparing LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, etc., and actually build an agent end-to-end, we just published a video that shows exactly how to do that in Latenode.
Here’s what the video covers:
How to define your agent’s purpose, not just picking a framework
How to build the workflow visually: trigger → agent node → tool integrations
How to write a system prompt & choose a model so your agent actually works
How to deploy and test your agent in a real workflow (not just a tutorial toy)
If you’re ready to stop comparing and start shipping, this could be a great next step.
