# Build a production AI agent

> Which framework should I use to build a production AI agent?

Past the demo stage, the framework choice is about control and failure handling: state, retries, human-in-the-loop, observability. Three open-source frameworks dominate serious Python work, each with a different center of gravity.

A hand-picked shortlist from the Agent Search Engine index. Every pick is a real listing; the adoption, pricing, and activity figures are the index's live numbers. Browse on the web: https://agentsearchengine.app/use/build-production-ai-agent

## Recommended picks

### Production control: LangGraph
- Freemium · Framework
- **Setup:** Developer — Python/TS
- **Why:** Graph-based, stateful orchestration built for exactly this — controllable flows, checkpoints, human approval steps. The framework to reach for when reliability matters more than speed of first demo.
- [listing](https://agentsearchengine.app/agents/langgraph-platform) · [official](https://langchain.com/langgraph)

### Type-safe choice: pydantic-ai
- Open source · Framework · 19k★ · Python · MIT · active 2 days ago
- **Setup:** Developer — Python
- **Why:** Agent development with Pydantic's validation discipline — typed inputs and outputs catch a whole class of production bugs at the boundary instead of in the logs.
- [listing](https://agentsearchengine.app/agents/pydantic-ai) · [official](https://pydantic.dev/pydantic-ai)

### Fastest to multi-agent: crewAI
- Open source · Framework · 57k★ · Python · MIT · active 2 days ago
- **Setup:** Developer — Python
- **Why:** Role-based crews with the gentlest learning curve of the three — the quickest path from idea to a working multi-agent system, with a large community when you get stuck.
- [listing](https://agentsearchengine.app/agents/crewai) · [official](https://crewai.com)

## What to watch for
Framework choice is reversible; agent architecture mostly isn't. Whatever you pick, design for the failure cases first — timeouts, bad tool output, infinite loops — and add tracing before launch, not after the first incident.

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Source: [Agent Search Engine](https://agentsearchengine.app) — more task-first guides: https://agentsearchengine.app/use