# What's the difference between the Claude Agent SDK and AWS Strands Agents?

The Claude Agent SDK wraps the Claude Code binary as a library and runs only Claude; AWS Strands Agents treats the model as swappable, reaching Bedrock, Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, and Ollama through one interface. Anthropic's SDK ships built-in file, shell, and web tools, hooks, and subagents, all wired to Claude Code's own loop. Strands ships five named multi-agent patterns as first-party primitives instead: agents as tools, a swarm of agents handing work to each other, a graph of developer-defined nodes where an LLM picks which edge fires at each step, a deterministic fixed-DAG workflow, and cross-process A2A; the Claude SDK's nearest equivalent is a subagent, one level of delegation with no swarm or graph construct of its own.

The gap widens in what each hands you for grading a run. Strands integrates natively with OpenTelemetry once you install its otel extras and turn tracing on, exporting to an OTLP endpoint with [the same GenAI semantic-convention attribute names](/answers/otel-genai-conventions/what-are-the-opentelemetry-genai-semantic-conventions) any OTel-reading backend already expects. Claude Agent SDK telemetry is OpenTelemetry too, but spans still sit behind a beta flag and carry Claude Code's own names rather than the GenAI ones, so anything reading them needs a mapping step Strands doesn't require.

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Sources:
- Claude Docs: Agent SDK overview: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/agent-sdk/overview (fetched 2026-09-26)
- Strands Agents: Multi-agent patterns: https://strandsagents.com/docs/user-guide/sdk/multi-agent/multi-agent-patterns/ (fetched 2026-09-26)
- Strands Agents: Traces: https://strandsagents.com/docs/user-guide/sdk/observability-evaluation/traces/ (fetched 2026-09-26)

Source: https://tessary.ai/answers/claude-agent-sdk-evals/whats-the-difference-between-claude-agent-sdk-and-aws-strands
More on Claude agent sdk evals: https://tessary.ai/answers/claude-agent-sdk-evals
From Tessary, agent reliability for AI agents in production: https://tessary.ai