Google Agent Development Kit (ADK) vs LangGraph
A side-by-side comparison of capabilities, autonomy, integrations, and pricing to help you choose.
Short answer: choose Google Agent Development Kit (ADK) if you want open-source framework for building and orchestrating multi-agent systems (Supervised agent, free); choose LangGraph if you want low-level framework for stateful, durable, graph-based llm agents (Supervised agent, freemium).
| Google Agent Development Kit (ADK) | LangGraph | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Open-source framework for building and orchestrating multi-agent systems | Low-level framework for stateful, durable, graph-based LLM agents |
| Type | framework | framework |
| Autonomy | Supervised agent | Supervised agent |
| Pricing | free · Free (open source; pay model + cloud usage) | freemium · Framework free (MIT); LangGraph Platform via LangSmith (free Developer tier) |
| Best for | developers, enterprise | developers, enterprise, mid-market |
| Deployment | self-hosted, api | self-hosted, api, saas |
| Modalities | text, code, api | text, code, api |
| Models | gemini, model-agnostic | model-agnostic, gpt, claude, gemini, open-source |
| Protocols | a2a, mcp, function-calling, rest-api | function-calling, mcp, rest-api |
| Integrations | Vertex AI, Cloud Run, Gemini, LiteLLM, MCP servers | OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, AWS Bedrock, LangSmith |
| Capabilities | 3 documented | 4 documented |
Google Agent Development Kit (ADK)
- +Backed by Google with first-class deployment to Vertex AI and Cloud Run
- +Built around the open A2A protocol for cross-framework agent interoperability
- +Model-agnostic via LiteLLM despite Gemini-first defaults
- -A framework, not a product: you build, host, and secure agents yourself
- -Strongest when paired with Google Cloud, which can imply lock-in
LangGraph
- +Explicit graph model makes complex agent control flow (loops, branching, multi-agent routing) inspectable and controllable
- +Production-grade primitives: durable execution, checkpointing/time-travel, and first-class human-in-the-loop interrupts
- +Open source and model-agnostic, with a hosted LangGraph Platform and LangSmith observability for deployment
- -Lower-level and more verbose than higher-level agent libraries; a steeper learning curve
- -Framework, not a product: autonomy and quality depend entirely on what the developer builds
Which should you choose?
Google Agent Development Kit (ADK) is open-source framework for building and orchestrating multi-agent systems, best for developers, enterprise. LangGraph is low-level framework for stateful, durable, graph-based llm agents, best for developers, enterprise, mid-market. The right choice depends on the autonomy level you want, your existing integrations, and your budget, all compared above.
This comparison is generated from the sourced Google Agent Development Kit (ADK) and LangGraph profiles. Open either profile to review its evidence and last-reviewed date.