Strands Agents vs AI SDK
Strands Agents (AWS) and AI SDK (Vercel) side by side on public data, as of Oct 6, 2026.
AI SDK has 4.0x the weekly package downloads of Strands Agents (34.5M against 8.7M). AI SDK has 3.1x the GitHub stars of Strands Agents (27.1K against 8,679). Over the last 30 days downloads moved +2% for Strands Agents and +21% for AI SDK. Strands Agents shipped 43 stable releases in the past 90 days.
Side-by-side numbers
| Metric | Strands Agents | AI SDK |
|---|---|---|
| Pulse Score | 63 | 67 |
| Overall rank | #13 | #11 |
| Downloads, last 7 days | 8.7M | 34.5M |
| Downloads, 7-day change | up 0.6% | up 13.5% |
| Downloads, 30-day change | up 2.0% | up 20.9% |
| VS Code installs | — | — |
| Marketplace rating | — | — |
| GitHub stars | 8,679 | 27.1K |
| Homebrew installs, 30 days | — | — |
| Hacker News mentions, 30 days | 0 | 6 |
| Latest stable release | 1.58.0 · yesterday | 6.0.301 · yesterday |
| Stable releases, 90 days | 43 | |
| Terminal-Bench (best run) | — | — |
| Price | Free (OSS) | Free (OSS) |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| First released | — | — |
| Interfaces | Python library, TypeScript library | TypeScript library |
| Models |
Trends
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)
AI SDK
Vercel's TypeScript toolkit for building AI applications and agents, with one API across model providers and UI helpers for streaming.
Pricing: AI SDK is open source and free to use; you pay only for the models and infrastructure it runs on.
Latest release 6.0.301:
- Updated dependencies [3824c69]
- Updated dependencies [6e8ec70]
- @ai-sdk/gateway@3.0.210