Google Agent Development Kit
Hacker ApprovedShares rank 10 of 28 agent frameworks by recommenders
Free open-source framework for building AI agents, praised for clean abstractions and multi-language support. Critics call it unpolished and rapidly changing.
Free open-source framework for building AI agents, praised for clean abstractions and multi-language support. Critics call it unpolished and rapidly changing.
21 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 16
- criticize it
- 5
- approval share
- 76%
Recommended in 10 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 16 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 3.2 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 10 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Well designed abstractions
“It has a ton of day 2 features, really nice abstractions, and positioned itself well in terms of the building blocks and constructing workflows.”
Comment from 22 Nov 2025 in “Agent design is still hard” “I would place Google ADK in alignment with Kubernetes more than this project, for the well designed abstractions, the controlplane”
Comment from 7 Apr 2026 in “Google Open Sources Experimental Agent Orchestration Testbed Scion” “ADK is really well designed. We've used it as the harness for our main product since about January and it's been solid.”
Comment from 30 Jul 2026 in “Go LLM SDK for streaming, tool-calling AI backends (plus frontend React lib)” - Comment from 13 Mar 2026 in “How are people debugging multi-agent AI workflows in production?”
- Comment from 13 Feb 2026 in “Ask HN: What makes an AI agent framework production-ready vs. a toy?”
Handles bookkeeping and day-two features
“It has a ton of day 2 features, really nice abstractions, and positioned itself well in terms of the building blocks and constructing workflows.”
Comment from 22 Nov 2025 in “Agent design is still hard” “handles all that bookkeeping for me, has a few options built in, and pretty easy to add new implementations”
Comment from 13 Dec 2025 in “SSE sucks for transporting LLM tokens” “My agent framework (ADK) does this for free.”
Comment from 1 Mar 2026 in “Queuelo – Approval infrastructure for AI agents” - Comment from 3 Feb 2026 in “GitHub Browser Plugin for AI Contribution Blame in Pull Requests”
Runtime agnostic, multiple languages
“ADK is great framework for building agents as it is runtime agnostic”
Comment from 17 Feb 2026 in “A remote control for your agents” “This is my goto SDK, it comes in multiple languages too.”
Comment from 28 Oct 2026 in “The Agent SDK” “I use ADK-go (also available in py, ts, java)”
Comment from 14 Feb 2026 in “Ask HN: How do you build internal agents at work?”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Lacks local persistent memory
“I really wish ADK had a local persistent memory implementation, though.”
Comment from 22 Nov 2025 in “Agent design is still hard” “I really with that things like Google ADK didn't add this to my deps.”
Comment from 21 Oct 2026 in “Compromised LiteLLM 1.107.0 on PyPI Installs a Credential Stealer and Backdoor”
Other agent frameworks people recommend
The four most recommended other agent frameworks, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claude Agent SDK | 36 | 25 | 59% | 11 | — | — |
| LangChain | 32 | 79 | 29% | 10 | 1 yr3 owners | — |
| Mastra | 32 | 3 | 91% | 10 | — | Approved |
| LangGraph | 31 | 23 | 57% | 12 | — | — |
| Google Agent Development KitThis page | 16 | 5 | 76% | 10 | — | Approved |
What people said
37 of the 41 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“This is my goto SDK, it comes in multiple languages too.”
“I really with that things like Google ADK didn't add this to my deps.”
“I think Google's ADK ecosystem and this new AX platform is promising”
“they have features for exactly this, mixing determ with agentic in a dag”
“ADK is really well designed. We've used it as the harness for our main product since about January and it's been solid.”
“v2 reorients it around graph operators for control flow”
“I would place Google ADK in alignment with Kubernetes more than this project, for the well designed abstractions, the controlplane”
“Agent deployment infra is exactly the layer that's missing right now.”
“ADK makes it simple by using a prebuilt Lima VM for CLI deploy, but that doesn't work well in development.”
“Big fan of ADK, I use the Go version.”
“their ADK open source agent framework is quite good too”
“The framework I use (ADK) already handles this, very low hanging fruit that should be a part of any framework”
“a well thought through framework by a company that leads in both AI and engineering”
“they typically don't provide durable execution—if the process crashes, the agent will restart from scratch”
“My agent framework (ADK) does this for free.”
“ADK is a great framework for building agentic systems”
“I like ADK, it's lower level and more general, so there is a bit you have to do to get a "claw" like experience”
“I already have durable agents in ADK with postgres and dagger”
“ADK is great framework for building agents as it is runtime agnostic”
“I use ADK-go (also available in py, ts, java)”
“Great interfaces that are easy to extend with code.”
“ADK does that for me in a database”
“It indeed has too much abstraction.”
“ADK is open source as I like it”
“handles all that bookkeeping for me, has a few options built in, and pretty easy to add new implementations”
“you can go a level down and build on something like the ADK to bring your expertise and experience to the building blocks”
“ADK is minimal and easy to adjust as we learn things”
“some big IDs are not passed precisely in Google ADK framework”
“I really wish ADK had a local persistent memory implementation, though.”
“It has a ton of day 2 features, really nice abstractions, and positioned itself well in terms of the building blocks and constructing workflows.”
“I've been using Google ADK to create custom agents (fantastic SDK).”
“Google ADK is real nice and gives you an API as well”
“easier to get started for basic agent apps”
“An agent is just an object, you assign it tools that are just functions, and agents can call other agents.”
“Been looking forward to this.”
“a readable, nice example in [1] which explains itself”
“I'd say its a bit unpolished, as is the rest of the rapidly developing ADK framework, but it does exist.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.