Claude Agent SDK vs Strands Agents
Claude Agent SDK (Anthropic) and Strands Agents (AWS) side by side on public data, as of Oct 6, 2026.
Claude Agent SDK has 2.5x the weekly package downloads of Strands Agents (21.5M against 8.7M). Claude Agent SDK and Strands Agents are close on GitHub stars (8,219 and 8,679). Over the last 30 days downloads moved +1% for Claude Agent SDK and +2% for Strands Agents. Claude Agent SDK shipped 50 stable releases in the past 90 days. Strands Agents shipped 43 stable releases in the past 90 days.
Side-by-side numbers
| Metric | Claude Agent SDK | Strands Agents |
|---|---|---|
| Pulse Score | 59 | 63 |
| Overall rank | #17 | #13 |
| Downloads, last 7 days | 21.5M | 8.7M |
| Downloads, 7-day change | up 14.6% | up 0.6% |
| Downloads, 30-day change | up 0.6% | up 2.0% |
| VS Code installs | — | — |
| Marketplace rating | — | — |
| GitHub stars | 8,219 | 8,679 |
| Homebrew installs, 30 days | — | — |
| Hacker News mentions, 30 days | 6 | 0 |
| Latest stable release | 0.2.163 · 6d ago | 1.58.0 · yesterday |
| Stable releases, 90 days | 50 | 43 |
| Terminal-Bench (best run) | — | — |
| Price | Free (OSS) | Free (OSS) |
| License | MIT (Python SDK) | Apache-2.0 |
| First released | — | — |
| Interfaces | Python library, TypeScript library | Python library, TypeScript 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
Strands Agents
An open-source SDK from AWS for building and controlling agents in Python and TypeScript.
Pricing: Strands Agents is open source and free to use; you pay only for the models and infrastructure it runs on.
Latest release 1.58.0:
- feat(ts): port mcprouter vended tool to TypeScript (#4448) (ec86d614d)
- feat(bidi): normalize token usage events (#4886) (3973d1cb8)
- feat(multiagent): migrate agent axis policies to SDKs (#4714) (d87a0718a)
- feat(stop): use agent.cancel() to stop the event loop (#3506) (5e82809b3)