OpenAI Agents Python vs RAG-Anything

OpenAI's openai-agents-python is the production evolution of the experimental Swarm framework — a lightweight, opinionated Python SDK for building multi-agent workflows without the bloat of heavyweight orchestration frameworks. It abstracts agents as first-class objects with typed handoffs, tool registries, and structured output handling, while staying thin enough to understand in an afternoon. The framework leans heavily on Python type hints and function decorators rather than XML configs or complex DAGs, making it feel closer to writing ordinary Python than setting up a workflow engine. Agent handoffs are explicit — you define which agent can delegate to which, under what conditions — giving you audit trails that many competitors lack. The SDK also integrates natively with the OpenAI models API, including structured output models and the function calling spec. The repo is trending today with 625 new stars, reflecting that despite dozens of agent frameworks in the ecosystem, developers keep returning to official, well-maintained options with clear upgrade paths. For teams building on GPT-5 and OpenAI's infrastructure, this is likely to become the default starting point.

RAG-Anything is an all-in-one Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework from HKUST's Data Systems Group that handles multimodal documents through a single unified pipeline. Unlike RAG frameworks that only handle plain text, it natively ingests and retrieves across text, tables, images, scientific figures, and mixed-modality documents without requiring separate preprocessing pipelines for each type. The framework covers the full RAG stack: document parsing, chunking strategies adapted to content type, embedding, vector storage, retrieval ranking, and generation. It's built to handle the kinds of documents that real enterprise workloads throw at you — PDFs with embedded tables, research papers with figures, reports that mix structured and unstructured content. With 16,000+ stars and academic backing from HKUDS (the same group behind LightRAG), it carries credibility beyond typical weekend projects. The key insight is that most RAG failures in production happen at the parsing and modality-handling stage, not the retrieval stage. By making multimodal handling a first-class concern rather than a bolt-on, RAG-Anything aims to close the gap between RAG demos and RAG production deployments.