AutoGen

Name: AutoGen
Author: Microsoft

AutoGen by Microsoft: what it does, how it works, pricing and adoption — sourced and dated.

Agent frameworks Open source · MIT (code); documentation CC-BY-4.0 Maintenance mode ≈61.2K GitHub stars (2026-09)

AutoGen, Microsoft Research's conversation-driven multi-agent framework, pioneered the multi-agent patterns most frameworks now copy — and it is the cautionary row in this section: with about 61,000 GitHub stars it is the most-starred framework here, yet Microsoft moved it to maintenance mode (bug fixes and security patches only; last Python release v0.7.5 on September 30, 2025) and its README directs new users to Microsoft Agent Framework. A community fork, AG2, continues the original lineage.

How it works

Agents interact through structured conversations — two-agent chats, group chats with a manager picking the next speaker, nested patterns — with code execution and human-in-the-loop built in. Historically significant, now in maintenance mode (see status).

The facts

Maker	Microsoft
Type	Agent framework
Category	Agent frameworks
Status	Maintenance mode — bug fixes and security patches only
License	MIT (code); documentation CC-BY-4.0
Models	Model-agnostic conversation framework from Microsoft Research.
GitHub stars	61,243 (snapshot 2026-09) · microsoft/autogen
Website	https://microsoft.github.io/autogen/

Pricing

Free and open source. No hosted tier; the supported successor is Microsoft Agent Framework.

Pricing model: Free / open source · Source: published tiers · checked Oct 14, 2026

Frameworks run on models — compare them in the model database or check the price comparison before you build.

Also in Agent frameworks

LangGraph — LangChain
CrewAI — CrewAI
Microsoft Agent Framework — Microsoft
OpenAI Agents SDK — OpenAI
LlamaIndex — LlamaIndex
Strands Agents — AWS

Sources

Profile verified Oct 14, 2026. Spotted an error? Every figure above links to its source.