AutoGen

AutoGen is an open-source framework from Microsoft that helps developers build AI applications where multiple agents work together to solve problems. Instead of a single chatbot that tries to do everything, AutoGen lets you create teams of specialized agents that can converse, delegate tasks, and collaborate on complex workflows. It's designed for both beginners who want to experiment quickly and serious developers building production-grade multi-agent systems.

The framework is built around a few key components. AgentChat provides a high-level, event-driven API for creating conversational agents, while Core offers a lower-level programming model for more granular control. There's also AutoGen Studio, a web-based interface that lets you prototype with agents without writing any code — you can visually design agent workflows and test them in the browser. For developers who want to extend the framework, AutoGen supports community extensions and integrations with external services through the Model-Context Protocol (MCP). The project is actively maintained with regular version releases, and the documentation includes clear guides for getting started, whether you prefer the visual approach or diving straight into Python.

AutoGen is ideal for developers and researchers working on AI applications that require multi-step reasoning, tool use, or collaboration between specialized agents. It's particularly useful for building things like automated research assistants, coding agents that can write and execute code, or workflow automation tools that need to coordinate multiple AI capabilities. The framework's flexibility means you can start with a simple two-agent setup and scale up to complex systems with dozens of agents as your needs grow.