{"name":"OpenAI Agents SDK","tagline":"Official Python agents runtime — agents, handoffs, guardrails, sessions; not the Responses API itself.","url":"https://openai.github.io/openai-agents-python/","category":"agents","pricing":"free","price_note":"SDK free (pip install openai-agents); model/tool calls billed at OpenAI API rates; tracing uses your OpenAI account","free_tier":true,"open_source":true,"api":true,"self_host":true,"model_routing":"locked","verdict":"situational","verdict_text":"The runtime on top of Responses, not a second Responses card. Tiny primitives (agent, handoff, guardrail, session) plus sandbox and realtime paths. You own orchestration less than with raw Responses, more than with a visual builder. Tokens still land on the API bill.","limitations":["Default loop talks to OpenAI; other providers are possible but second-class.","Built-in tracing is convenient and also a data-boundary choice.","Not a no-code product; you write Python.","Swarm is the old experiment — this SDK is the replacement."],"strengths":["Official Python agents runtime with tiny, composable primitives.","Agent, handoff, guardrail, and session abstractions out of the box.","Includes sandbox and realtime paths beyond basic chat loops."],"use_for":["Python developers building agents on top of the OpenAI Responses API.","Teams wanting more orchestration than a no-code builder but less than raw API code."],"skip_when":["You need a visual no-code interface for building agents.","First-class non-OpenAI providers are a hard requirement.","Built-in tracing sending data to OpenAI is a data-boundary problem."],"receipts":["https://openai.github.io/openai-agents-python/","https://github.com/openai/openai-agents-python"],"affiliate":"none","evidence_tier":"source-verified","momentum":"blueshift","featured":false,"last_verified":"2026-08-19","observed_by":"whysanesanders","slug":"openai-agents-sdk","canonical_url":"https://noemium.com/tools/openai-agents-sdk/","attribution":"Noemium catalog data is licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). See https://noemium.com/method/ for how entries are verified."}