OpenAI Swarm
OpenAI's experimental multi-agent orchestration framework — superseded by the Agents SDK.
About
Swarm (openai/swarm, MIT, ~22k stars) was OpenAI's experimental framework for multi-agent orchestration via routines and handoffs. It has been effectively superseded by the OpenAI Agents SDK, which is the production path — Swarm has seen no releases in 12 months and its last push was April 2026.
Included for historical completeness: it remains a clean, minimal example of the handoff pattern, but do not start new projects on it.
What it can do
- Lightweight routines-and-handoffs pattern
- Minimal educational codebase
- Client-run orchestration
- Superseded by the Agents SDK
Setup
pip install git+https://github.com/openai/swarm.git.- Set
OPENAI_API_KEY. - Note: for new projects, use the OpenAI Agents SDK instead.
Prerequisites
Python 3.8+; OpenAI API key. (Prefer the Agents SDK for new work.)
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 7/10
Scored 7/10 (metrics tier). Historically important (~22k stars, MIT) but stale since April 2026 with zero releases in 12 months — explicitly superseded by the Agents SDK. Kept as a historical record, clearly marked as not for new projects. Metrics tier.
★ 22,049 GitHub stars
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 8.1/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 4.8/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 9.1/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 6.0/10
- · 22,049 GitHub stars (log-scaled vs catalog peers)
- · last push 181d ago; 0 releases/12mo; 36 open issues
- · manual review: OpenAI experimental framework; stale since Apr 2026; superseded by the Agents SDK — historical interest; license: MIT
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.