Strands — Agent Frameworks Platform
Agent FrameworksLayer 3What is Strands?
Strands Agents is an open-source AI agent SDK developed by AWS that takes a model-driven approach to building and running AI agents in just a few lines of code. Launched as a preview in May 2025, Strands reached version 1.0 in July 2025, bringing production-ready multi-agent orchestration capabilities. The framework uses the reasoning abilities of modern LLMs to handle planning and tool usage autonomously, eliminating the need for hardcoding complex task flows.
Strands is actively used in production by multiple AWS teams, including Kiro, Amazon Q Developer, and AWS Glue. The SDK supports multiple AI providers including Amazon Bedrock, Anthropic, Gemini, LiteLLM, Llama, Ollama, OpenAI, and Writer, making it truly provider-agnostic. Strands 1.0 introduced new primitives for multi-agent architectures, support for the Agent-to-Agent (A2A) protocol, a session manager for retrieving agent state from remote datastores, and improved async support throughout the SDK.
The framework offers comprehensive features including multi-modal support (text, speech, and image processing), rich AWS service integrations, extensibility for custom tools, and robust observability capabilities. With natural language workflow definitions through Agent SOPs and integration with Model Context Protocol (MCP), Strands provides a modern, scalable approach to building production-grade AI agents.
Pros & Cons
Pros
- +Production-proven by AWS teams (Amazon Q, AWS Glue)
- +True provider-agnostic support for 8+ LLM providers
- +Comprehensive multi-agent orchestration with A2A protocol
- +Rich AWS ecosystem integration
- +Open-source with active development
Cons
- -Relatively new framework (launched 2025)
- -AWS ecosystem bias in design and tooling
- -Variable costs depending on chosen providers
Strands Pricing
Free trial available
- ✓Full SDK access
- ✓Multi-agent orchestration
- ✓Multi-modal support
- ✓Provider-agnostic
- ✓Community support
- ✓Pay for model usage
- ✓AWS infrastructure
- ✓Production scalability
- ✓Enterprise support
- ✓OpenAI pricing
- ✓Anthropic pricing
- ✓Gemini pricing
- ✓Custom model pricing
Using Strands with Respan
Integrate Strands Agents with Respan to gain comprehensive observability into your multi-agent systems, monitor LLM calls across providers, track agent reasoning chains, and optimize costs across AWS Bedrock and other AI providers.
- ✓Monitor agent orchestration and multi-agent communication patterns
- ✓Track LLM usage and costs across Amazon Bedrock, Anthropic, OpenAI, and other providers
- ✓Evaluate agent reasoning quality and tool usage effectiveness
- ✓Debug complex agent workflows with detailed trace analysis
- ✓Optimize prompt performance and reduce latency in production
Best Strands Alternatives & Competitors
Top companies in Agent Frameworks you can use instead of Strands.
Compare Strands
Best Integrations for Strands
Companies from adjacent layers in the AI stack that work well with Strands.
Last verified: March 10, 2026