# What's the difference between the OpenAI Agents SDK and AutoGen?

The OpenAI Agents SDK moves work by handoff: one agent delegates a task to another named agent, and that's the whole exchange. Microsoft's AutoGen signature pattern is a group chat instead, several agents reading the same thread while a manager decides who speaks next each round.

AutoGen rebuilt itself between v0.2 and v0.4 into what its own migration guide calls "an asynchronous, event-driven architecture." The current AgentChat layer offers `RoundRobinGroupChat` and `SelectorGroupChat` for picking a next speaker, plus a Swarm preset that drops the central manager: each agent hands off by name through a tool call instead of a manager choosing, but every agent in a Swarm still reads and writes the same shared thread. The Agents SDK never runs a shared thread: a handoff hands the task and context to one named agent, and nothing else reads that exchange unless it's handed off again.

Both patterns carry the same risk at the boundary: [what looks fine in one agent's own output can still be the failure, if the fact it needed never crossed to the next agent](/answers/mast-taxonomy/why-per-agent-grading-misses-multi-agent-failures). A group chat just has more boundaries for that to happen at than a single handoff does.

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Sources:
- OpenAI Agents SDK documentation: https://openai.github.io/openai-agents-python/ (fetched 2026-09-28)
- AutoGen migration guide: v0.2 to v0.4: https://microsoft.github.io/autogen/stable/user-guide/agentchat-user-guide/migration-guide.html (fetched 2026-09-28)

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