Claude Agent SDK vs LangChain
Claude Agent SDK (Anthropic) and LangChain (LangChain) side by side on public data, as of Oct 6, 2026.
LangChain has 2.1x the weekly package downloads of Claude Agent SDK (44.3M against 21.5M). LangChain has 17.9x the GitHub stars of Claude Agent SDK (147K against 8,219). Over the last 30 days downloads moved +1% for Claude Agent SDK and -22% for LangChain. Claude Agent SDK shipped 50 stable releases in the past 90 days. LangChain shipped 14 stable releases in the past 90 days.
Side-by-side numbers
| Metric | Claude Agent SDK | LangChain |
|---|---|---|
| Pulse Score | 59 | 77 |
| Overall rank | #17 | #4 |
| Downloads, last 7 days | 21.5M | 44.3M |
| Downloads, 7-day change | up 14.6% | up 1.9% |
| Downloads, 30-day change | up 0.6% | down 22.0% |
| VS Code installs | — | — |
| Marketplace rating | — | — |
| GitHub stars | 8,219 | 147K |
| Homebrew installs, 30 days | — | — |
| Hacker News mentions, 30 days | 6 | 73 |
| Latest stable release | 0.2.163 · 6d ago | 1.4.3 · 8d ago |
| Stable releases, 90 days | 50 | 14 |
| Terminal-Bench (best run) | — | — |
| Price | Free (OSS) | Free (OSS) |
| License | MIT (Python SDK) | MIT |
| First released | — | — |
| Interfaces | Python library, TypeScript library | Python library, JavaScript library |
| Models |
Trends
Claude Agent SDK
Anthropic's SDK that exposes the agent loop, tools and context management behind Claude Code, for building custom agents in Python and TypeScript.
Pricing: The SDK is free to install; usage is billed through the Claude API or a Claude subscription.
Latest release 0.2.163:
- Updated bundled Claude CLI to version 2.1.286
- CI: pinned the model for issue triage to fix failures caused by the CLI's new default model
LangChain
A framework for building LLM applications and agents from composable parts: model integrations, tools, retrievers and prebuilt agent abstractions. Available for Python and JavaScript.
Pricing: LangChain is open source and free to use; you pay only for the models and infrastructure it runs on.
Latest release 1.4.3:
- Changes since langchain==1.4.2
- release(langchain): 1.4.3 (#40888) fix(langchain): sanitize cache settings for fallback models (#40886) feat(langchain): support Bedrock Mantle chat models in initchatmodel (#40837)…