AutoGen
In one line
AutoGen is Microsoft Research's multi-agent framework, built around conversational agents that exchange messages and divide work between themselves.
Going deeper
AutoGen is Microsoft Research's multi-agent framework, first released in 2023. Its core abstraction is the 'conversable agent' — every action is reduced to messages exchanged between agents, which makes collaboration, review and code execution emerge naturally from conversation rather than from special-cased flow control.
The pattern AutoGen is best known for is UserProxy plus AssistantAgent: a stand-in for the human and an LLM assistant trade messages, run code and verify results until the task is done. It works well for code generation and data analysis flows where iteration and execution are tightly coupled.
AutoGen 0.4 reorganised the architecture heavily and added production-leaning features like distributed execution and event-driven messaging. Where CrewAI is anchored on role definitions, AutoGen is anchored on the message protocol — that is a fair shorthand for the difference.
Related terms
LangGraph
LangGraph is the graph-based agent workflow framework from the LangChain team — built so that branches, loops and human-in-the-loop steps are first-class.
AI AgentLlamaIndex
LlamaIndex is an LLM framework focused on RAG and data integration — a toolkit for indexing diverse documents, databases and APIs and connecting them to a model.
AI AgentCrewAI
CrewAI is a multi-agent framework that lets you stand up role-based agents that work as a team, with role, goal and task defined declaratively.
AI AgentSwarm
Swarm is OpenAI's lightweight, experimental multi-agent framework that boils coordination down to two ideas: handoffs between agents and small routines they each follow.
AI AgentMulti-Agent System
A multi-agent system is several AI agents with different roles cooperating on the same task — used when one agent alone is not enough to solve the problem.
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