Google Agent Development Kit vs LangSmith
Google Agent Development Kit
adk.dev
LangSmith
langchain.comSide by side
| Figure | Google Agent Development Kit | LangSmith |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | $39/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | Yes | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 2 | 3 |
| Spec score · AI Agent Platforms | 8.8 (#7) | 9.0 (#4) |
| Deployment | Agents can run locally, in containers, on Cloud Run, on GKE or on Google's managed Agent Runtime. | Deployment provides managed or self-hosted agent servers with streaming, cron scheduling, authentication, MCP support and more than 30 API endpoints. |
| Evaluation | Documentation covers evaluation criteria, user and environment simulation, custom metrics and optimization workflows. | Evaluation supports offline datasets, online production evaluations, human annotation queues and side-by-side experiment comparison. |
| Integrations | The integrations catalog includes tools and connectors for MCP, Google Cloud, databases, search, observability, and third-party services. | Documented integrations cover OpenAI, Anthropic, Bedrock, Gemini, Mistral, LiteLLM, OpenTelemetry, CrewAI, Vercel AI SDK, PydanticAI, AutoGen and many other frameworks and providers. |
| Limit: learning curve | InfoWorld reports that ADK's extensive capabilities require substantial time and effort to learn. | Reviewers commonly describe the interface and concepts as dense or overwhelming for new users. |
| Purpose | ADK is an open-source framework for building, debugging, evaluating, and deploying AI agents. | LangSmith is a commercial agent engineering platform for building, testing, deploying, monitoring, and improving AI agents. |
| Security | The security guidance covers identity and authorization, input and output guardrails, sandboxed code execution, and network controls. | LangSmith's trust center lists SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001:2022, GDPR and HIPAA compliance. |
| Self-hosting | The framework can be containerized and operated on infrastructure chosen by the developer without changing agent code. | Enterprise customers can run LangSmith self-hosted or hybrid on Kubernetes in AWS, Google Cloud or Azure. |
| Support | The site links to community resources and says Google and the ADK team do not support the content in external community resources. | The Developer plan includes community support, and the Enterprise plan lists a support SLA. |
| What it does | ADK is Google's open-source framework for building, debugging, evaluating and deploying production AI agents and multi-agent systems. | LangSmith is LangChain's framework-agnostic platform for observing, evaluating and deploying AI agents. |
Plans
Google Agent Development Kit
- ADK frameworkFree
- Google Agent Development Kit (ADK)Free
In their own words
Google Agent Development Kit
Google Agent Development Kit (ADK) is an open-source framework for building, debugging, evaluating, and deploying AI agents. It is available in Python, TypeScript, Go, Java, and Kotlin. Graph-based workflows can combine deterministic code with adaptive AI reasoning, and hierarchical agents can delegate work to specialized agents. ADK supports Gemini and adapters for other model providers, including locally running models. Its integrations catalog includes tools and connectors for MCP, Google Cloud, databases, search, observability, and third-party services. Teams can create multi-turn evaluation datasets and run evaluations locally through the CLI or development UI. ADK also supports live agents with bidirectional text and audio streaming, manages session context, and connects to longer-term memory services. Deployment options include Google Cloud Agent Runtime, Cloud Run, GKE, container-friendly infrastructure, and local Docker or Podman environments. Security guidance covers identity, authorization, guardrails, sandboxed code execution, and network controls. ADK is free; model and cloud-service use may require separate access or billing. Agent Config is narrower: it currently supports only Gemini models and requires Python.
LangSmith
LangSmith is a commercial agent-engineering platform for building, evaluating, deploying, monitoring, and improving AI agents. It supports offline evaluations on curated datasets and real-time scoring of production interactions. Evaluation methods include human review, heuristic checks, LLM-as-judge evaluators, pairwise comparisons, and custom Python or TypeScript evaluators. Annotation queues route runs to subject-matter experts for feedback that can calibrate evaluations, improve prompts, or augment datasets. The Playground compares prompt versions or model providers, and LangSmith chat can auto-improve prompts. Observability includes agent and retrieval tracing, token and general cost tracking, trajectory monitoring, online evaluations, and webhook or PagerDuty alerts. Traces can arrive through SDKs or an API from LangGraph, custom Python, or other stacks; SDKs are listed for Python, TypeScript, Go, and Java. Hosting ranges from cloud to hybrid and self-hosted Enterprise options. The Developer plan costs nothing, Plus costs $39 a month, and Enterprise pricing is custom.