I recently discovered that Google released their Agent Development Kit (ADK) as an open source project and I’m really impressed with what I’ve seen so far. The toolkit comes with built-in streaming capabilities and Model Context Protocol support right from the start, which seems pretty convenient. I’ve been working with LangGraph for my agent projects, but now I’m wondering if ADK might be a better choice. Has anyone here tried both frameworks? I’m curious about the performance differences and whether the learning curve is worth it. The native MCP integration is particularly interesting since I’ve been struggling to implement that functionality manually. What’s your experience with Google’s new agent development framework? Any major pros or cons I should consider before making the switch?
Been running ADK in production for 3 weeks after 8 months with LangGraph. The biggest difference is memory management - ADK’s way more efficient with tokens, which cuts our API costs.
LangGraph debugging was a nightmare for complex workflows. ADK’s execution tracing actually works - you can see what’s happening without going insane. MCP support is solid too. Used to waste weekends fighting LangGraph’s external tool integrations.
Nobody talks about deployment. ADK works fine with standard containers. LangGraph always needed special handling in our CI/CD.
Downside: vendor lock-in. Sure it’s open source, but it’s very Google-centric. If they pivot or drop support, you’re screwed. LangGraph has more community backing.
We moved new projects to ADK but kept existing LangGraph stuff. Migration isn’t worth it unless ADK fixes specific problems you’re having.
I switched from LangGraph to ADK two months ago - mixed bag honestly. ADK’s setup is way smoother. You can have a basic agent running in minutes vs the config nightmares I dealt with in LangGraph. The streaming works great right out of the box, which saved me tons of time since I was patching together custom streaming before. But ADK gets restrictive when you need custom agent behaviors. LangGraph gives you way more control over execution flow - ADK forces you into their patterns. The docs are still catching up too. I’ve had to dig through source code multiple times to figure out how things work. Performance-wise, ADK feels faster for standard stuff, but LangGraph still wins for complex multi-step reasoning. If your projects are straightforward and you want rapid prototyping, go with ADK. For experimental or specialized architectures, stick with LangGraph’s flexibility.
depends on ur timeline. ADK’s still new so expect some breaking changes - i’ve hit em twice already. langgraph’s clunkier but stable. if you need somethin reliable for months, i’d wait on ADK till it matures.
I’m coming from enterprise dev where stability beats shiny new features, so I’d be careful with this switch. We looked at ADK internally but decided to wait six months. It’s promising - especially that MCP integration you mentioned - but the ecosystem isn’t there yet. Third-party library support is still hit-or-miss compared to LangGraph’s solid plugin ecosystem. Those documentation gaps people are talking about? They’re real. We wasted tons of time figuring out stuff that should’ve been obvious. That said, ADK’s opinionated approach might work great if it fits your needs. I’d build a small test agent first to see how it handles your specific requirements before doing a full migration. The performance gains are legit, but you’re trading away the community support and battle-tested patterns you get with LangGraph.
Different perspective here - it comes down to how committed you are to Google’s ecosystem. We looked at ADK last month and the integration is solid if you’re already on Google Cloud services. Auth flows and deployments just work when you stay in their stack. But ADK gets rigid when you need custom nodes or weird execution patterns. LangGraph’s messier to set up, but you can make it do whatever you want when requirements get strange. The MCP support is nice, though rolling your own in LangGraph isn’t as bad as it looks once you know the patterns. I’d prototype your trickiest use case in ADK first - if it handles that well, go for the migration. If not, you’ll hit roadblocks later when you scale.