OpenAI Agents SDK vs Rasa: Which Agent Framework to Use?

OpenAI Agents SDK and Rasa both let you build an agent, but they sit in different parts of the stack and they assume different things about who's writing the code.

OpenAI's Agents SDK (evolved from Swarm) provides Agent, Runner, handoffs, and guardrails.

Rasa is an open-source framework for building conversational AI — chatbots and virtual assistants.

Underneath, both wrap the same thing: a model call, a tool dispatch, a loop. The decision is about which abstraction your team wants to think in day to day, and which ecosystem you're willing to inherit along with it. There's an honest, framework-free version of the same pattern in about 60 lines of Python in the lesson at the bottom of this page — useful as a baseline regardless of which framework wins.

Pick OpenAI Agents SDK if the Agents SDK is the thinnest framework on this list — it barely abstracts beyond what you'd write yourself. Use it when you want OpenAI's conventions and auto-schema generation. Skip it when you want full control or use non-OpenAI models. The tradeoffs in its intro should match how your team already thinks about agents; Rasa will feel like translation if they don't.

Pick Rasa if rasa is purpose-built for production conversational AI with enterprise requirements — on-premise deployment, regulatory compliance, deterministic business logic. For general-purpose agents or simple chatbots, an LLM with a system prompt and a few tools is faster to build and more flexible. The tradeoffs in its intro should match how your team already thinks about agents; OpenAI Agents SDK will feel like translation if they don't.

Whichever you pick, you're inheriting a dependency tree and a vocabulary your team has to learn before they ship anything. OpenAI Agents SDK has its own class hierarchy and tool registration conventions; Rasa has its. Either way, when something misbehaves you'll be reading framework source before you reach the actual HTTP call.

If the real workload is one model and a handful of tools, both can feel like a workbench for driving a nail. The lesson below builds the same pattern in plain Python — useful as a comparison point even if you ultimately keep the framework.