Strands Agents
Strands Agents by AWS: what it does, how it works, pricing and adoption — sourced and dated.
Agent frameworks Open source · Apache-2.0 ≈8.3K GitHub stars (2026-09)
Strands Agents is AWS's open-source agent SDK, launched in preview in May 2025 and at 1.0 in 2026, taking the opposite bet from explicit-graph frameworks: the model drives the loop. AWS runs it internally for Amazon Q Developer, AWS Glue and the Kiro IDE, and it deploys natively to Lambda, Fargate and Bedrock AgentCore. The current harness-sdk monorepo holds about 8,300 GitHub stars — small next to its download numbers, a gap AWS attributes to adoption through its own products.
How it works
Model-driven rather than graph-driven: you give the agent a model, tools and a prompt, and the model plans its own loop — deciding which tools to call and when — with sessions that resume across restarts and multi-agent patterns (agents-as-tools, handoffs, swarms, graphs) built in.
The facts
| Maker | AWS |
| Type | Agent framework |
| Category | Agent frameworks |
| Status | Active |
| Launched | 2025 |
| License | Apache-2.0 |
| Models | Model-agnostic with Amazon Bedrock as the natural default; also Anthropic direct, OpenAI, Gemini, Ollama and LiteLLM routing. Native MCP and A2A support. |
| GitHub stars | 8,300 (snapshot 2026-09) · strands-agents/harness-sdk |
| Website | https://strandsagents.com |
Pricing
Free and open source (Apache-2.0). Production deployment typically runs on Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, which is usage-priced AWS infrastructure.
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
- AutoGen — Microsoft
- Microsoft Agent Framework — Microsoft
- OpenAI Agents SDK — OpenAI
- LlamaIndex — LlamaIndex
Sources
- Open Data Science — Top 10 AI agent orchestration frameworks (2026)
- Redreamality — Strands Harness SDK (GitHub API figures, Sep 25, 2026)
Profile verified Oct 14, 2026. Spotted an error? Every figure above links to its source.