LangChain alternatives in 2026
Three multi-agent frameworks on the same six criteria, every claim read off that project's own repository — beside the freshness score this site measures every night.
Start with the one fact none of the roundups carries: AutoGen has stopped. Its own README says so — "AutoGen is now in maintenance mode. It will not receive new features or enhancements and is community managed going forward" — and Microsoft names the successor, Microsoft Agent Framework, with a migration guide. If you are choosing today, that removes a column. Between the other two, choose CrewAI when the work is a team of specialists and you want one framework covering both autonomy and control, and choose LangChain when integration surface and ecosystem matter more than opinion. Both are MIT, both are company-owned, both sell operational tooling beside the framework — LangSmith and the CrewAI AMP Suite — and neither publishes a word about its own maintenance. That last point is the general case rather than an accusation: AutoGen is the exception here, not the rule, and a reader who takes silence for health is reading nothing at all. StillShipping reads those scores from the GitHub API every night for exactly that reason, and publishes them per tool at /is/langchain-maintained, /is/crewai-maintained and /is/autogen-maintained.
3 compared · 6 criteria, identical for every column · every competitor figure read off that company's own page · last verified 2026-08-14
agent and spec frameworks compared on the same 6 criteria
| LangChain | CrewAI | AutoGen | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is, in its own words | A framework for building agents and LLM applications "The agent engineering platform. LangChain is a framework for building agents and LLM-powered applications. It helps you chain together interoperable components and third-party integrations." | A multi-agent automation framework "Fast and flexible multi-agent automation framework. CrewAI is an open-source Python framework with high-level abstractions and low-level APIs for building production-ready multi-agent workflows." | A framework for multi-agent AI applications "AutoGen is a framework for creating multi-agent AI applications that can act autonomously or work alongside humans." |
| What its README says about its own maintenance | Not published The README carries no statement about the project's maintenance status, no deprecation notice and no successor. What it does carry is routing advice within its own ecosystem — "just getting started? check out deep agents" and, for orchestration, LangGraph. Read on the repository's own front page on 14 August 2026. | Not published No maintenance statement, deprecation notice or successor anywhere on the README. The closest thing to a health signal it publishes is adoption — "with over 100,000 developers certified through our community courses" — which is a different claim. Read on the repository's own front page on 14 August 2026. | Maintenance mode, with a named successor "⚠️ Maintenance mode. AutoGen is now in maintenance mode. It will not receive new features or enhancements and is community managed going forward. New users should start with Microsoft Agent Framework. Existing users are encouraged to migrate using the AutoGen → Microsoft Agent Framework migration guide." The only one of the five that publishes its own status at all. |
| How you install it | uv add langchain The quickstart is three lines: install, `init_chat_model`, invoke. A JS/TS equivalent, langchain.js, is published separately. | uv pip install crewai "Q: How do I install CrewAI? A: Install CrewAI with uv: uv pip install crewai. For additional tools, use: uv pip install 'crewai[tools]'." A `crewai create crew` CLI scaffolds a project. | pip install autogen-agentchat "AutoGen requires Python 3.10 or later." Installed as `autogen-agentchat` plus an extension package for the model client; `autogenstudio` is published separately as a no-code GUI. |
| Licence | MIT Shown in the repository's own file navigation alongside its code of conduct, contributing guide and security policy. | MIT "CrewAI is released under the MIT License." Stated in the README as well as in the repository's file navigation. | MIT, plus CC-BY-4.0 The repository's file navigation lists two: a CC-BY-4.0 licence and an MIT licence, with a separate LICENSE-CODE file. The only dual-licensed project of the five. |
| Who publishes it | langchain-ai A company-owned repository, which is the arrangement four of these five share and the one that most affects what happens to the project if the company's priorities move. | crewAIInc Company-owned, with a commercial suite published from the same README — so the framework and the product it feeds are maintained by the same organisation. | microsoft Published from Microsoft's own organisation, which is also what makes its maintenance notice load-bearing: the successor it names is another Microsoft product. |
| What it sells alongside | LangSmith, and a deployment platform "LangSmith - agent evals, observability, and debugging for LLM apps" and "LangSmith Deployment - deploy and scale agents with a purpose-built platform". The framework is MIT; the paid surface sits beside it rather than inside it. | CrewAI AMP Suite "For organizations that need a commercial control plane around CrewAI, CrewAI AMP Suite adds managed deployment, observability, governance, security, and enterprise support." One part, the Crew Control Plane, is offered free to try. | Not published The README publishes no paid tier, hosted plan or commercial suite for AutoGen itself. What it names instead is a successor framework rather than a product sold alongside this one. Read on the repository's own front page on 14 August 2026. |
“Not published” means that company does not state the figure on the page cited at the foot of this page. It is not a claim that no such figure exists. A company that publishes no limit most likely has none — but “most likely” is not a fact, and this table prints what was read rather than what was inferred.
- What its README says about its own maintenance — whether the project's front page tells a reader that it is still being developed, has stopped, or has a successor — as distinct from what its commit graph implies
What are the best alternatives to LangChain?
CrewAI is the strongest direct alternative if your problem is multi-agent: it is a "fast and flexible multi-agent automation framework" with two explicit primitives — role-based Crews for autonomy, event-driven Flows for control — and it states it is standalone rather than a layer on something else. AutoGen was the other obvious answer and is no longer one for new projects: its README puts it in maintenance mode and points new users at Microsoft Agent Framework. If what you actually want is orchestration rather than a different framework, LangChain's own answer is LangGraph, which its README describes as the framework "for building controllable agent workflows".
Is AutoGen deprecated?
Its own README describes it as being in maintenance mode, which is close to but not the same as deprecated: "AutoGen is now in maintenance mode. It will not receive new features or enhancements and is community managed going forward. New users should start with Microsoft Agent Framework. Existing users are encouraged to migrate using the AutoGen → Microsoft Agent Framework migration guide." So it still installs, it is still MIT (alongside a CC-BY-4.0 licence for non-code content), and the code you already depend on has not been withdrawn — but nothing new is coming, and Microsoft has said where to go instead. That is a far better position to be in than an unmaintained project that says nothing.
Which agent framework is most actively maintained?
That is a question about this week rather than about the documentation, and none of the three publishes an answer. The table above records what each project says about itself; StillShipping's board records what each repository actually did, rescored nightly from the GitHub API on commit recency, release cadence, issue response time and maintainer count. AutoGen is the only one of the three whose README says anything about its own status at all. Treating the other two's silence as evidence of health is the specific mistake this site exists to make unnecessary.
Do any of these lock you into a paid product?
Not at the licence, and it is worth knowing where the money is anyway. All three are MIT-licensed. LangChain sells LangSmith — "agent evals, observability, and debugging for LLM apps" — and a deployment platform beside it. CrewAI sells the AMP Suite, "a commercial control plane around CrewAI" adding managed deployment, observability, governance, security and enterprise support. AutoGen publishes no paid tier at all, which in its case is less reassuring than it sounds: what funds a free framework is usually the paid product beside it, and AutoGen's successor is the thing Microsoft is now investing in.
How is this list different from a roundup article?
A roundup is a snapshot of the day someone wrote it, and the thing most likely to have changed since is not the API surface — it is whether anyone is still merging. Every claim in the table above is a quotation from the project's own repository with the date it was read, and every figure on the board is measured from the GitHub API on the night you are reading. Where a project publishes nothing on an axis, the cell says "Not published" and names the page that was read rather than inferring an answer — which is how a table stays a reference rather than becoming an opinion.
When each of these is the right pick
StillShipping does not sell any of these and has nothing to gain from which one you choose — it scores them. Each case below is the one that option genuinely wins.
- LangChain — You want the largest integration surface in this market and you expect the underlying models to keep changing under you. LangChain's own framing is exactly that — it helps you "chain together interoperable components and third-party integrations to simplify AI application development - all while future-proofing decisions as the underlying technology evolves" — and it is the only one of the five that publishes a whole ecosystem around the core: Deep Agents for common patterns, LangGraph for low-level orchestration, LangSmith for evals and observability, and a JS/TS library.
- CrewAI — The shape of your problem is a team of specialists rather than a chain of calls, and you want one framework that does both autonomy and control without a second dependency. CrewAI splits those explicitly — "CrewAI Crews: optimize for autonomy and collaborative intelligence with role-based AI agents" and "CrewAI Flows: build event-driven automations that combine precise workflow control, single LLM calls, and native support for Crews". It is also the only one of the five that states it is standalone: "CrewAI is a standalone Python framework with its own primitives for agents, tasks, crews."
- AutoGen — You already have AutoGen in production and you are deciding whether to move. Then read its own README first, because it answers the question for you: it is in maintenance mode, it "will not receive new features or enhancements", and Microsoft names the successor — "new users should start with Microsoft Agent Framework", with a published migration guide. A framework that tells you plainly it has stopped is more useful to a maintainer than one that has quietly stopped and says nothing, and that candour is a real reason to trust the code you already depend on while you migrate off it.
What was checked, and when
Prices and limits move, and a page quoting a stale one is worth less than a page quoting none. Every source is printed here so a reader can check it against the day they are reading this, and a job re-fetches each of these URLs on a schedule and fails when a figure above no longer appears on the page it came from.
- LangChain — github.com/langchain-ai/langchain — What it is, in its own words, What its README says about its own maintenance, How you install it, Licence, Who publishes it, What it sells alongside. Read 2026-08-14.
- CrewAI — github.com/crewAIInc/crewAI — What it is, in its own words, What its README says about its own maintenance, How you install it, Licence, Who publishes it, What it sells alongside. Read 2026-08-14.
- AutoGen — github.com/microsoft/autogen — What it is, in its own words, What its README says about its own maintenance, How you install it, Licence, Who publishes it, What it sells alongside. Read 2026-08-14.
Last verified 2026-08-14. https://stillshipping.kynth.studio/langchain-alternatives
