Open Source
$0
Free
- Full SDK access
- Multi-agent orchestration
- Multi-modal support
- Provider-agnostic
- Community support
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.
What this tool does well, and the limitations to keep in mind.
Pros
Cons
What's included in each plan, and how the tiers compare.
$0
Free
Variable
Per request
Variable
Based on provider
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.
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Last verified: March 10, 2026