smolagents
Barebones library for building agents that write Python code to call tools.
How smolagents is used
smolagents is a dependency in 5 of the 6,208 public GitHub projects set up for AI coding agents that we scanned, too few to describe it from them alone. Our scan also samples projects by dependency (Solana 2,661, Ethereum and EVM 1,496, 3D and games 2,818, agent frameworks and SDKs 10,983); counting those, it appears in 196 projects, and what it is used with below comes from all of them. The most used alternative in our scan is LangChain (126 projects). Projects that use it most often also use Requests (59.7%), python-dotenv (58.7%), pandas (54.6%).
smolagents popularity over time
Gid Score 46: downloads 44, use in agent projects 60, GitHub stars n/a, downloads trend 56 (each 0-100). How it is calculated.
Often used with smolagents
| Requests | 59.7% of smolagents projects · 8.8× more than average |
|---|---|
| python-dotenv | 58.7% of smolagents projects · 6.4× more than average |
| pandas | 54.6% of smolagents projects · 12.7× more than average |
| OpenAI Python Library | 49.0% of smolagents projects · 12.4× more than average |
| NumPy | 48.0% of smolagents projects · 8.2× more than average |
| Hugging Face Hub | 37.8% of smolagents projects · 41.1× more than average |
| Pydantic | 36.7% of smolagents projects · 4.3× more than average |
| Pillow | 36.2% of smolagents projects · 9.4× more than average |
From all 196 projects in our scan that use smolagents, including the dependency samples.
Install
| Package | pip install smolagents |
|---|---|
| Main stacks | Python (196) |
| Example projects | sentient-agi/OpenDeepSearch, FlagOpen/RoboBrain2.5, GAIR-NLP/DeepResearcher, femto/minion-agent, togethercomputer/open_deep_research |
Alternatives to smolagents
Tools that do the same job, so a project picks one or the other. Add-ons and libraries used alongside smolagents are not listed here; they are in "Often used with".
| Tool | Gid Score | Used in agent projects | Downloads / wk | GitHub stars | License |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LangChain pypi Framework for composing applications with LLMs through chains and agents. |
88 | 126 (7.8%) | 37.3M | 148K | MIT |
| Pydantic AI pypi AI agent framework built with Pydantic for structured, typed agent development. |
62 | 16 (1.0%) | 1.5M | 20.7K | MIT |
| LangGraph SDK pypi SDK for interacting with LangGraph API to build and run agent workflows. |
73 | 9 (0.6%) | 12.2M | 43.6K | MIT |
| CrewAI pypi Framework for orchestrating collaborative AI agents to solve complex autonomous tasks. |
62 | 3 (0.2%) | 669K | 59.9K | MIT |
| Semantic Kernel pypi Microsoft SDK for integrating LLMs with traditional code for AI applications. |
51 | 3 (0.2%) | 73.1K | 28.7K | MIT |
More in Agent, MCP and tool libraries: Model Context Protocol SDK (JavaScript) Model Context Protocol SDK (Python) FastMCP (Python) LangGraph LangChain.js Mastra Agent Client Protocol SDK MCP Inspector