Agent Development Kit: review, pricing, security and alternatives

What Agent Development Kit does

Agent Development Kit belongs to the frameworks family: libraries for building your own agents in code: loop, tools, memory, orchestration. On our grid it ranks #5 of the 28 projects of this family listed in the directory.

Unlike a ready-made agent, a framework provides the parts to build one: tool calling, step sequencing, memory, coordination of several agents. It is aimed at teams that want a custom agent.

You use it from: developer SDK, terminal (CLI), web app, and API. Usable models: Gemini (Google), Claude (Anthropic), GPT (OpenAI), local models (Ollama, llama.cpp, vLLM…), and any OpenAI-compatible model. It can run on your own machine or server.

Who is Agent Development Kit for?

It is for developers building their own agent or adding agentic AI to a product. Typical tasks people give it:

• build a business agent wired to your APIs
• orchestrate tool and model calls
• add memory and error recovery to an agent

It is a good candidate if you are comfortable in a terminal, your data must stay on your machines, and you want the option of a local model, with no API fees.

Access and human control

A framework has no access of its own: the tools you plug in define what the agent can do. Start with read-only tools.

We could not establish whether it asks for human approval before sensitive actions: test it first on an unimportant account or folder.

Agent Development Kit pricing

The code is free, under the Apache-2.0 licence.

Getting started with Agent Development Kit

1. Install it: the project ships as a Python package (install with pip or uv). The exact command is in the repository README.
2. Pick the model: an API key from a provider, or a local model if your machine has enough graphics memory (the VRAM calculator tells you).
3. Start with the minimal example from the docs, then add one tool at a time and check what the agent does with it.
4. Give it a short, checkable task, review the result and its action log, then raise the difficulty step by step.

Security: risk level

A framework does not protect you by default: approval, minimal rights and sandboxing are up to you.

Three habits: least privilege (minimal rights, dedicated keys), human approval for irreversible actions, a sandbox for code execution. The AI agent security check reviews your setup in a few minutes.

Project activity and releases

Created on April 1, 2025, the google/adk-python repository has 21,990 stars, 4,229 forks and 189 open issues, with 4,967 commits in total. It received changes this month.

Over the last 52 weeks: 3,489 commits, an average of 67.1 per week.

91 releases in total; 30 in the last twelve months. Latest release: v2.13.0, on October 23, 2026.

Agent Development Kit vs other frameworks

GitHub stars of the best-rated open-source projects in the frameworks family. Stars measure attention, not quality: a heavily promoted project collects them fast, a specialised tool will have few.

Agent Development Kit and other frameworks at a glance

The 7 best-ranked agents in the same family, 7 of them open source. The score out of 100 only applies to open-source projects; for proprietary services we show the published entry price. A dash marks information the documentation does not state.

How we rated it

Score: 83/100, computed only from public, verifiable data, with no subjective testing or partnership:

• Adoption 28/40: 21,990 stars on a log scale (40 points from about 200,000).
• Activity 30/30: last commit less than a month ago, 30 releases in six months, 3,489 commits in a year.
• Framework 25/30: licence, default human approval, self-hosting, model choice and documentation site.

The score does not say whether the agent will succeed at your tasks: it measures how solid the project is. The full grid is on the method page.