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title Comparison with Claude Agent SDK
sidebarTitle Comparison with Claude Agent SDK
description Compare LangChain Deep Agents with the Claude Agent SDK to choose the right tool for your use case.

This page explains how LangChain Deep Agents compares to the Claude Agent SDK. Both are harnesses for building custom agents, but they make different tradeoffs around execution environments, deployment, and vendor coupling.

Deep Agents is used in production by [OpenSWE](https://github.com/langchain-ai/open-swe) and [LangSmith Fleet](/langsmith/fleet/index).

At a glance

Deep Agents Claude Agent SDK
Where the agent runs Inside a sandbox, or outside a sandbox executing commands remotely Inside a sandbox
Execution backend Pluggable: local, virtual filesystem, remote sandbox, or custom Local filesystem of the sandbox it runs in
Model provider Any (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, 100+ others) Claude (Anthropic, Bedrock, Vertex, Azure)
Deployment LangSmith managed cloud via deepagents deploy, or self-host a standalone image via langgraph build Self-host. You build the server, auth, and streaming layer. Claude managed agents is a separate product
Multi-tenancy Built-in: scoped threads, per-user sandboxes, RBAC Build it yourself
License MIT MIT (Claude Code itself is proprietary)

Main differences

Agent and execution environment

There are two patterns for connecting agents to sandboxes: running the agent inside the sandbox, or running the agent outside and using the sandbox as a tool.

The Claude Agent SDK only supports the first. Your agent runs inside a sandbox and executes tools against the sandbox's local filesystem. Anthropic's hosted model Claude managed agents use a decoupled model, which reflects where production agent architectures are heading.

Deep Agents supports both, and lets you pick a backend to wire them together. In practice, this means you can:

  • Run the agent inside a sandbox (same model as Claude Agent SDK).
  • Run the agent in a long-lived container and use a remote sandbox as a tool, executing commands over the network.
  • Swap in a virtual filesystem for tests, or a custom backend for your own infrastructure.

Multi-tenancy

When you productionize your application, you generally expose it to many end users and must isolate the environtment for each user.

In Claude Agent SDK, the SDK ties the agent to its sandbox. To give each user an isolated execution environment, you must build an API wrapper that spins up a sandbox per user, tracks which sandbox belongs to whom, and tears it down afterwards.

Deep Agents handles this directly: configure a sandbox per user or per assistant in the harness, with scoped threads, run history, and RBAC included. If you use LangSmith Sandbox, you also get an auth proxy out of the box so end users can call third-party APIs from the sandbox without you provisioning credentials per user.

A production agent server

To expose a self-hosted Claude Agent SDK app to end users, you write your own HTTP/WebSocket or SSE server that invokes the agent, streams tokens back, and manages conversation threads. That server is yours to build, operate, and secure.

Deep Agents deployments include an agent server out of the box: streaming endpoints, thread management, run history, webhooks, and authentication.

Managed cloud or self-hosted

Claude Agent SDK deployments are self-hosted. The SDK and Claude managed agents are separate products. Code written against the SDK does not deploy directly to the managed offering.

Deep Agents runs in two modes without code changes:

LLM

Claude Agent SDK execution bundles the model, backend, and deployment and optimizes support between all three.

With Deep Agents, you pick the model provider, the execution backend, and the deployment target independently. By choosing this harness you retain maximum flexibility in your choice of model and infrastructure.

Summary

  • Choose Deep Agents if you want model and infrastructure flexibility, built-in multi-tenant deployment, and the option to run managed or self-hosted without code changes.
  • Choose Claude Agent SDK if you're committed to Claude, and wish to self-host, and build the API, auth, and multi-tenant layers yourself.
**Notice a mistake?** 
We drafted this comparison on April 16th, 2026. If products have changed, please [file an issue](https://github.com/langchain-ai/docs/issues).