Agno
title: Agno radar_quadrant: Platforms radar_ring: Assess radar_position: inner created: 2026-05-22 last_updated: 2026-05-22 related: ["Temporal", "Permify", "ModelContextProtocol"]
Agno (formerly phidata) is a Python SDK for building and operating AI agents in production. It provides the full platform stack — agent definition, API deployment, tool integrations, security, observability, and scheduling — addressing the operational layer that composition libraries like LangChain leave to the developer.
Build: Define agents in Python with memory (conversation history, user preferences), knowledge bases (RAG over documents), and tools (web search, code execution, database queries). 100+ pre-built tool integrations including Slack, Google Drive, SQL databases, and external APIs.
Deploy: Run agents as managed API services with 50+ endpoints supporting REST, Server-Sent Events (SSE), and WebSockets. Suitable for streaming agent responses to a frontend.
Secure: JWT-based authentication, role-based access control, multi-user and multi-tenant isolation built in — not bolted on.
Observe: Built-in tracing, run history, and audit logs. Every agent invocation is recorded with inputs, outputs, tool calls, and latency.
Schedule: Cron-based background agent jobs without external infrastructure (no separate Celery/Temporal setup for simple scheduled tasks).
| Agno | LangChain | LlamaIndex | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Focus | Full agent platform | Composition/chaining | RAG/data layer |
| Deployment | Built-in API server | DIY | DIY |
| Auth/security | Built-in JWT+RBAC | DIY | DIY |
| Observability | Built-in | Via LangSmith (paid) | DIY |
| Scheduling | Built-in cron | DIY | DIY |
LangChain and LlamaIndex are libraries; Agno is a platform. The distinction matters when shipping agents as real products.
Started as phidata (focused on data-augmented AI assistants) and rebranded to Agno as the scope expanded to a full agent platform. Repository remains at phidatahq/phidata on GitHub.
Agno sits at Platforms → Assess inner. The production operational gap in open-source AI agent tooling is real — LangChain is excellent for prototyping but leaves auth, deployment, and observability to the developer. Agno's integrated approach reduces the surface area of custom infrastructure needed to ship an agent as a product. 40k+ stars (v2.6.9), active development. Trial gate: an agent deployed as a real API endpoint with at least one tool integration and tracing enabled.
