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Agno vs CrewAI

Two fact sheets from our own research, side by side — pricing, platforms, API access and status re-checked by us rather than quoted from the vendors.

The short answer

Free plan
Both have one
Public API
Both have one
Best fit
Agno: Python developers building product copilots, research or support agents they will host themselves · CrewAI: Python developers prototyping multi-agent workflows with clear roles and delegation
Platforms
Agno: Web · CrewAI: Web, Linux, macOS, Windows
Trust score
About even — Agno 88, CrewAI 92

From our own records as of each tool's last check. Anything we have not confirmed is left out rather than guessed. How we verify

AgnoOpen-source Python SDK and self-hosted runtime for building agents, teams and workflows, with a web control plane to monitor them.CrewAIOpen-source Python framework for role-based agent crews and event-driven flows, with a hosted platform for running them

Side by side

FactAgnoCrewAI
CategoryAgent Frameworks & OrchestrationAI Agents & Autonomous Workers
Pricing modelFreemiumFreemium
Starts at$150/mo—
Public APIYesYes
Trust score88 / 10092 / 100
PlatformsWeb, APIWeb, API, Linux, macOS, Windows
CompanyAgnoCrewAI, Inc.
Launched2022—
Last verifiedOct 2, 2026Sep 6, 2026

What our research says

Agno

Agno suits Python developers who want a compact framework and a runtime they host themselves, rather than a managed agent service. The free tier is unusually complete, since the local control plane is unlimited, and you pay only when you want a live control plane with team access. Teams that prefer graph-style orchestration or a larger plugin ecosystem may find other frameworks more familiar.

Pros

  • Apache-2.0 SDK with agents, teams, workflows and 100+ toolkits
  • Runtime serves agents over REST, MCP and chat interfaces and runs in your own cloud
  • Free plan has no usage caps or retention limits on the local control plane
  • Large open-source community, with over 40,000 GitHub stars

Cons

  • The live control plane starts at $150 a month before add-ons
  • Heavy rebranding history means older tutorials show Phidata imports and APIs
  • SAML SSO is a $300 a month add-on and custom RBAC is Enterprise only

CrewAI

CrewAI is the quickest way to get a team of role-defined agents working on a task, and Flows added the deterministic control that early crews lacked. The open-source core is free and widely used; the paid platform is for teams that want governance and managed execution without building the plumbing. Treat the enterprise claims on the homepage as marketing and the free tier's 50 executions as a trial, not a plan.

Pros

  • MIT-licensed framework with a large community and about 59,700 GitHub stars
  • Crews for collaboration and Flows for state, branching and loops cover both exploratory and production shapes
  • Free platform tier with a visual editor, AI copilot and GitHub integration costs nothing to try
  • Enterprise deployment on CrewAI cloud, your VPC or on-premise, with PII redaction and policy controls

Cons

  • Enterprise pricing is quote-only, with executions beyond the free 50 a month behind sales
  • Role-playing agent abstractions can hide cost: every delegation is another LLM call
  • Debugging a crew means reading long non-deterministic delegation traces, and observability on the free tier is not described on the pricing page
  • Homepage usage claims (65% of the Fortune 500, 450M+ workflows a month) are the vendor's own

Which one fits

Choose Agno if you need

  • Python developers building product copilots, research or support agents they will host themselves
  • Teams that want built-in memory, knowledge, tracing and approvals without stitching tools together
  • Companies that need agent data to stay in their own cloud

Choose CrewAI if you need

  • Python developers prototyping multi-agent workflows with clear roles and delegation
  • Teams that want an opinionated structure (Crews inside Flows) instead of wiring a graph from scratch
  • Enterprises that need SSO, RBAC and VPC deployment around agents they already built on the framework

Agno vs CrewAI: the questions people ask

Is Agno cheaper than CrewAI?

Agno starts at $150/mo. CrewAI has a free tier; what its paid plans cost is not confirmed by us yet.

Does Agno or CrewAI have a free tier?

Both: Agno has a free tier, and CrewAI has a free tier.

Which has a public API, Agno or CrewAI?

Both ship a public API, so either can be built on; the fact table above shows the platforms each one runs on.

More comparisons

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