LangChain vs OpenHands

LangChain is a free, MIT-licensed open-source framework for building agents with models and tools. Its create_agent harness combines a model, tools, prompt and middleware, with templates for common uses and a ReAct pattern. Middleware can add human approval, conversation compression, sensitive-data removal, guardrails, retries, routing and custom tool policies. Agents run on LangGraph’s durable runtime, which supports persistence, rewind, checkpointing and human-in-the-loop workflows. LangChain documents more than 1,000 integrations across chat and embedding models, tools, toolkits, document loaders and vector stores. Standard interfaces for chat models and embeddings support switching providers with minimal code changes. Documentation covers Python and JavaScript/TypeScript. LangSmith adds tracing, debugging and output evaluation. The framework supports API and self-hosted use. LangChain was started in 2023 and is headquartered in San Francisco.

OpenHands is an open-source platform for creating and operating AI coding agents. It offers a terminal or CLI, a shared web interface, and an SDK for building agents and coordinating workflows in code. Automations can start agents in response to activity on GitHub, Slack, Jira, or Linear, on schedules, and through supported integrations. Described engineering tasks include reviewing pull requests, triaging issues, investigating incidents, and opening pull requests with suggested fixes. OpenHands supports agent stacks including Claude Code, Codex, Gemini CLI, and Gemini CLI, as well as other stacks, closed models, and open weights. It can run locally, in the cloud, or in an organization’s VPC; enterprise customers can self-host on Kubernetes. Enterprise controls include runtime isolation, secret and tool permissions, audit logs, prompt-injection detection with automatic halting, and governance tools such as RBAC, reporting, budgeting, and an LLM gateway. The free Open Source plan lists one user and unlimited daily conversations; Individual lists one user and 10 daily conversations. Enterprise lists unlimited users and conversations. An early-preview Agent Canvas desktop app supports macOS, Windows, and Linux.