Akka vs CrewAI (2026)

Agents call function tools and MCP tools as the model requests, services integrate over REST, OpenAPI, gRPC, WebSocket and Kafka or other brokers, and guardrails check MCP tool requests and responses.

Sourcedoc.akka.io/sdk/agents.html.mdread 2026-09-27

The framework ships a large tool library and custom tools and connects to MCP servers as tools, and CrewAI AMP adds authenticated enterprise integrations such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, Gmail, Microsoft 365, Jira, Notion, Stripe and Zendesk.

Sourcedocs-platform.crewai.com/platform/en/features/tools-and-integrationsread 2026-09-27

Durable workflows run long multi step processes with compensation and resume from the current step after a restart, agents share a session under a workflow, and autonomous agents coordinate by delegation, handoff, teams and moderation with a registry for dispatching to specialists at runtime.

Sourcedoc.akka.io/sdk/workflows.html.mdread 2026-09-27

Flows are event driven workflows with managed state and deterministic control, and Crews are teams of role based agents that delegate to one another; a Flow step can hand off to a Crew, processes run sequential or hierarchical with a manager agent, tasks can be conditional, and checkpointing lets runs be replayed or forked.

Sourcedocs.crewai.com/en/concepts/flowsread 2026-09-27

Timed Actions schedule delayed and recurring calls, Consumers react to event streams and Kafka topics, and Akka Streaming processes real time inputs such as IoT metrics, audio and video that can start agents, alongside HTTP, gRPC, WebSocket and MCP endpoints.

Sourcedoc.akka.io/llms.txtread 2026-09-27

Events in Gmail, Google Calendar and Drive, Outlook, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, Slack, HubSpot, Salesforce and Zapier can launch the chosen crew or flow through CrewAI AMP triggers, and webhook automation starts runs from outside systems.

Sourcedocs-platform.crewai.com/platform/en/guides/automation-triggersread 2026-09-27

Durable memory can hold semantic knowledge and retrieved data, and a sample RAG agent shows vector search with streaming, but indexing and retrieval over a customer's documents is code the developer writes. Akka does not ship a knowledge store of its own.

Sourcedoc.akka.io/akka-memory.html.mdread 2026-09-27

Knowledge sources give agents a reference library of the customer's files and data, embedded into a vector store (ChromaDB by default, Qdrant supported) through a provider neutral RAG client and queried during tasks; new sources are added without retraining.

Sourcedocs.crewai.com/en/concepts/knowledgeread 2026-09-27

Akka Memory keeps session memory for the turns of an interaction and durable long term memory across users, sessions and agents, scoped per session, per agent or shared, stored as an event sourced journal that is both the in memory tier and the durable record, with compaction of older context. Akka does not publish retention or deletion terms.

Sourcedoc.akka.io/akka-memory.html.mdread 2026-09-27

A unified Memory class stores what agents learn in a hierarchical scope tree that can be inspected, recalls by semantic similarity, recency and importance with a configurable recency half life, and forgets by scope, so one project's or customer's memory can be deleted without wiping the rest; it works with crews, agents and flows.

Sourcedocs.crewai.com/en/concepts/memoryread 2026-09-27

A workflow can pause for an approval command and resume where it left off, durably across crashes, deployments and days; autonomous agent pipelines carry a human approval task between drafting and publishing; Akka Verify HITL boundaries block in a reviewer queue until a person decides; and guardrails check model and MCP tool requests and responses, failing closed.

Sourceakka.io/llms-full.txtread 2026-09-27

Flows pause at @human_feedback steps for a person's review, and CrewAI AMP routes those requests by email to named reviewers with fallback responses on timeout; tasks can require human input before they complete, and a hallucination guardrail checks outputs.

Sourcedocs-platform.crewai.com/platform/en/features/flow-hitl-managementread 2026-09-27

The trust center (Akka dba Lightbend, Inc.) lists SOC 2 Type II on request, a public SOC 3, ISO 27001, ISO 42001, PCI DSS, HIPAA and GDPR among 50 standards, and Akka Automated Operations provides access control at the organization level, with secured HTTP and gRPC endpoints and secrets management in the SDK.

Sourcetrust.akka.ioread 2026-09-27

CrewAI offers RBAC with feature and entity level permissions and custom roles, SSO through WorkOS, Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, Auth0 or Keycloak on both SaaS and self hosted Factory, a secrets manager with cloud workload identity federation, and PII redaction for traces. No certification is named in the docs, and the trust center sits at trust.crewai.com.

Sourcedocs-platform.crewai.com/platform/en/features/rbacread 2026-09-27

A non sampled, hash chained interaction log records each agent interaction with authority snapshots, Verify emits typed events for every guardrail, human and evaluation decision, the local and Akka console show traces for debugging, and metrics, logs and traces export over OpenTelemetry.

Sourceakka.io/llms.txtread 2026-09-27

Traces in CrewAI AMP record every execution from inputs to outputs, including agent reasoning, task details, tool calls and outputs, tokens, timings and cost estimates, with OpenTelemetry export and a Datadog integration; the framework also emits events and integrates with tracing tools.

Sourcedocs-platform.crewai.com/platform/en/features/tracesread 2026-09-27

Akka runs self managed on the customer's own VMs, containers, Kubernetes, PaaS or edge, or through Akka Automated Operations in the customer's VPC or Akka's serverless cloud, with projects pinned to chosen regions, multi region replication and data pinning, and sovereign cloud deployments for China, Hong Kong, Singapore, North America, Canada and the EU.

Sourceakka.io/llms-full.txtread 2026-09-27

Enterprise deploys on CrewAI cloud, a dedicated VPC or the customer's own infrastructure (CrewAI Factory, self hosted), and the MIT framework runs anywhere the customer runs Python.

Sourcecrewai.com/pricingread 2026-09-27

A samples and blueprints catalog filters by AI use case, pattern, domain and governance: downloadable working samples such as a medical tagging agent with human verification, a real estate customer service agent and an IoT monitoring agent, plus 460 blueprints that the Akka Specify plugin turns into runnable systems.

Sourcedoc.akka.io/getting-started/samples.html.mdread 2026-09-27

Every plan lists agentic workflow templates, and the AMP Marketplace offers reusable assets and templates to install, but the templates and what each one does are not listed. The open source examples and cookbooks are starting points a developer adapts.

Sourcedocs-platform.crewai.com/platform/en/features/marketplaceread 2026-09-27

Nine providers are built in, Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Vertex AI, Bedrock, Mistral, Hugging Face, Ollama and LocalAI, any other plugs in as a custom provider, each agent can set its own model, and an AI Gateway Router and Akka Optimize route work to served open weight models.

Sourcedoc.akka.io/sdk/integrations/ai-and-models.html.mdread 2026-09-27

Each agent can take its own model, chosen by the developer from many providers through their native SDKs or any LLM connection, including custom LLM implementations, and AMP supports Azure OpenAI and Vertex AI setups.

Sourcedocs.crewai.com/en/concepts/llmsread 2026-09-27

The Akka SDK is the component model for agents, workflows, entities, views and endpoints, services expose HTTP, gRPC and MCP endpoints with A2A and ACP built into agents, and a CLI and Claude Code plugin with an MCP server manage projects. The runtime is source available under BSL.

Sourcedoc.akka.io/llms.txtread 2026-09-27

Deployed crews expose a REST API (GET /inputs, POST /kickoff, POST /resume, GET /status), the AMP platform API manages automations, users, roles and service accounts with access tokens, the Python framework and CLI are open source, and crews can be exported as MCP servers.

Sourcedocs-platform.crewai.com/api/introductionread 2026-09-27

EvalKit scores a service against a dataset of eval cases with deterministic, heuristic and agentic evaluators, saves baselines that CI gates regressions against, and renders reports; RedKit red teams against AILuminate and OWASP LLM Top 10 taxonomies, and Verify runs evaluations inline or over the interaction log.

Sourcedoc.akka.io/testing/evaluation/index.html.mdread 2026-09-27

crewai test runs a crew for a set number of iterations and scores each task from 1 to 10 with an evaluator model, and AMP lists LLM testing and agent training that turns runs into improvement data; evaluation integrations such as Patronus are documented.

Sourcedocs.crewai.com/en/concepts/testingread 2026-09-27

Akka is a runtime and SDK for backend agentic services, with no browser or computer use component.

Sourcedoc.akka.io/llms.txtread 2026-09-27

Agents reach the browser through third party engines added as tools, among them Stagehand, Browserbase, Hyperbrowser, MultiOn and a Selenium scraper, plus scraping tools, and CrewAI runs no browser of its own.

Sourcedocs.crewai.com/en/tools/web-scraping/overviewread 2026-09-27