How do they compare?
This SDK is trying to provide a bunch of code for implementing specific agent codebases. There are a bunch of open source ones already, so this is OpenAI throwing their hat in the ring.
IMO this OpenAI release is kind of ecosystem-hostile in that they are directly competing with their users, in the same way that the GPT apps were.
https://github.com/slavakurilyak/awesome-ai-agents
CrewAI is a popular VC-backed one, but two that I think are kind of interesting in the open source space are:
https://github.com/i-am-bee/beeai-framework
https://github.com/lastmile-ai/mcp-agent
... However I think the vast majority of "AI Agent" use-cases in practice right now are actually just workflows, and imo dify is great for those:
https://github.com/langgenius/dify
[edit] worth mentioning [langfuse](https://github.com/langfuse/langfuse), which is more like a platform that addresses the observability/evals/prompt management piece of the puzzle as opposed to a full-on "agent framework". In practice I have not yet run into a case where I needed something like what OpenAI just released, nor crewAI etc (despite it feeling like those cases may be coming)
I just realized BeeAI is IBM's project: https://www.ibm.com/think/news/beeai-open-source-multiagent
I also see there's https://ai.pydantic.dev/ but it lacks MCP support. Finally, the MCP site maintains a nice client list:
https://modelcontextprotocol.io/clients#feature-support-matr...
It does not specify how “agentic” systems interact with each other. Depending on what you mean there.