Agentic Index
Akka vs Databricks Agent Bricks (2026)
Both vendors last verified
Akka and Agent Bricks both run multi agent systems, and they differ on whether the data platform comes with it. That verdict is the Agentic Index coverage score, graded from each vendor's own published materials.
Agent Bricks is Databricks' platform for building, deploying and orchestrating multi agent systems, usage based on Databricks units, so it presumes the data estate is already there. Akka builds and runs multi agent systems on a durable distributed runtime unifying orchestration, agents, memory and streaming in one software development kit, open source core. If you are a Databricks shop, Agent Bricks is continuous with everything you have, and if you are not, Agent Bricks asks a great deal and Akka asks for a runtime.
On the Agentic Index self hosted platform ranking, Akka and Databricks Agent Bricks both clear the bar: each documents both containment capabilities in full. 171 of the 556 platforms it grades clear it. See the self hosted platform ranking
This comparison is published by Agentic Index, an independent agentic AI vendor research platform. Akka and Databricks Agent Bricks are each graded against the same 14 capability Agentic Index taxonomy, from the vendor's own public materials under the Agentic Index verification standard, alongside 1,084 researched vendors. No vendor pays for placement and no vendor has reviewed this page. How this evidence is graded
Choose Akka if
- You are not on Databricks and do not want to be for the sake of an agent platform.
- A durable distributed runtime with memory and streaming unified is the architecture you want.
- Open source core matters for your dependency and exit position.
Choose Databricks Agent Bricks if
- Databricks is already your data platform, which makes this incremental rather than new.
- Agents reasoning over your governed data estate is the primary use case.
- Usage based on units you already buy simplifies procurement entirely.
| Feature | A Akka |
D Databricks Agent Bricks |
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| Action & orchestration | ||
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Integrations & Tool Calling Ability to connect agents to real systems through native integrations, OAuth-authenticated actions, custom tools, APIs, webhooks, or MCP-compatible tools. |
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AkkaIntegrations & Tool Calling 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 |
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Databricks Agent BricksIntegrations & Tool Calling Agents take tools from managed, external and custom MCP servers, Unity Catalog functions, Databricks data and a sandboxed code execution tool, with role based access applied to models, tools and connections. Sourcedocs.databricks.com/agents/mcp-toolsread 2026-09-27 |
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Workflow Orchestration Ability to sequence, branch, retry, route, and combine deterministic workflow nodes with autonomous agent steps. |
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AkkaWorkflow Orchestration 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 |
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Databricks Agent BricksWorkflow Orchestration Supervisor Agent delegates work across Genie Agents, agent endpoints, Knowledge Assistant endpoints, Unity Catalog functions, MCP servers and custom agents and synthesizes the results, and code first multi agent systems are built with the Agent Framework. Sourcedocs.databricks.com/aws/en/agents/agent-bricks/multi-agent-supervisorread 2026-09-27 |
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Triggers & Channel Coverage How agents wake up and where they work: schedules, webhooks, message events, CRM events, inbox events, chat, email, voice, and collaboration tools. |
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AkkaTriggers & Channel Coverage 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 |
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Databricks Agent BricksTriggers & Channel Coverage Agents are served as REST endpoints or scheduled on recurring workflows through Lakeflow Jobs, which run without a person starting them, and Genie reaches users in Slack and on mobile. Sourcedatabricks.com/product/artificial-intelligence/agent-bricksread 2026-09-27 |
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| Knowledge & context | ||
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Knowledge Grounding & RAG Ability to ground agent behavior in company data through document ingestion, retrieval, external knowledge APIs, semantic search, or RAG layers. |
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AkkaKnowledge Grounding & RAG 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 |
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Databricks Agent BricksKnowledge Grounding & RAG AI Search (formerly Vector Search) is a governed vector index built into the platform that agents query for retrieval, and Knowledge Assistant builds a question answering agent over the customer's documents. Sourcedocs.databricks.com/ai-search/ai-searchread 2026-09-27 |
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Memory & State Persistence Ability to persist context across a run, conversation, workflow, user, team, or longer-term memory layer. |
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AkkaMemory & State Persistence 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 |
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Databricks Agent BricksMemory & State Persistence Managed agent memory, in beta, stores long term memory that persists across conversations in Lakebase, scoped per verified end user or to a team, project or organization key, with semantic search and the source session recorded, and managed sessions keep durable conversation history. It works with agents on any framework. Entries can be listed and searched, and there is no stated way to delete one user's entries. Sourcedocs.databricks.com/aws/en/agents/agent-memory/managed-memoryread 2026-09-27 |
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| Control & trust | ||
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Human Oversight & Guardrails Approval steps, consent checkpoints, escalation rules, structured guardrails, policy constraints, and pause/resume controls. |
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AkkaHuman Oversight & Guardrails 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 |
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Databricks Agent BricksHuman Oversight & Guardrails Service policies on MCP and model services can return an "ASK" decision that holds an interaction for human approval before it proceeds, such as a destructive MCP tool call, and also block PII, prompt injection and unsafe content; Supervisor Agent asks users to approve web search queries. Service policies are in beta and do not yet cover agent services. Sourcedocs.databricks.com/data-governance/unity-catalog/service-policiesread 2026-09-27 |
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Security, Identity & Governance RBAC, SSO, auditability, encryption, least-privilege tool access, compliance posture, and data handling policy. |
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AkkaSecurity, Identity & Governance 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 |
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Databricks Agent BricksSecurity, Identity & Governance Unity Catalog applies role based access to models, tools and connections with lineage, end users reach only the subagents and data they are granted, and model provider credentials stay behind privileges. Compliance profiles cover HIPAA, IRAP, PCI-DSS and FedRAMP High and Moderate, with reports available through the Databricks Security and Trust Center. Sourcedatabricks.com/product/artificial-intelligence/agent-bricksread 2026-09-27 |
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Observability & Auditability Traces, logs, execution histories, metrics, audit events, and debugging detail for production agent behavior. |
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AkkaObservability & Auditability 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 |
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Databricks Agent BricksObservability & Auditability MLflow Tracing captures every interaction, tool call and model invocation of an agent with no code changes, each session shareable by link, and Unity Gateway's unified tracing adds tool and skill use to model requests under Govern > Traces. Sourcedocs.databricks.com/mlflow3/genai/tracing/overviewread 2026-09-27 |
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Deployment & Data Residency Deployment modes and options, including SaaS, dedicated cloud, VPC, on-prem, hybrid, local runtime, and self-hosting. |
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AkkaDeployment & Data Residency 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 |
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Databricks Agent BricksDeployment & Data Residency The platform runs on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud with a published supported regions list, can be configured against the customer's own cloud account, and deploys agents to Model Serving endpoints or serverless Databricks Apps. Sourcedocs.databricks.com/resources/supported-regionsread 2026-09-27 |
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| Solution readiness | ||
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Prebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Ready-made workflows, packaged employees, templates, blueprints, industry solutions, and role-specific agents that reduce time-to-value. |
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AkkaPrebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs 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 |
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Databricks Agent BricksPrebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Named managed agents ship ready to configure. Knowledge Assistant answers questions over the customer's documents, Supervisor Agent coordinates other agents and tools, and Genie Agents answer natural language questions over governed data. Sourcedocs.databricks.com/agentsread 2026-09-27 |
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| Platform extensibility | ||
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Model Flexibility & Routing Ability to work across multiple foundation models, route tasks to different models, or let buyers bring their own providers and keys. |
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AkkaModel Flexibility & Routing 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 |
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Databricks Agent BricksModel Flexibility & Routing Admins connect external providers with their own keys (OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, Microsoft Foundry, Google Gemini Enterprise or a custom provider) as Unity Catalog securables granted per user, alongside hosted DeepSeek, Llama, Gemini, Claude and GPT models, and Smart Routing defaults can be set centrally. Sourcedocs.databricks.com/ai-gateway/model-provider-servicesread 2026-09-27 |
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APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Composability layer: stable APIs, SDKs, MCP tool consumption/serving, custom tools, and integration into internal systems. |
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AkkaAPIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility 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 |
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Databricks Agent BricksAPIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Agents are served as REST APIs, Supervisor Agents can be created programmatically with the Databricks SDK and queried through the API, Declarative Automation Bundles manage resources as code, and the Genie One MCP server, now generally available, exposes Genie to outside MCP clients under Unity Catalog permissions. Sourcedocs.databricks.com/aws/en/agents/agent-bricks/multi-agent-supervisorread 2026-09-27 |
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Testing, Debugging & Optimization Testing, debugging, scoring, retries, fallbacks, quality gates, and optimization loops for improving agent workflows before and after deployment. |
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AkkaTesting, Debugging & Optimization 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 |
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Databricks Agent BricksTesting, Debugging & Optimization MLflow scorers, which are LLM judges and code checks, grade traces from the UI or across a dataset with mlflow.genai.evaluate() to compare app versions. The same scorers run on a sample of production traffic, and Agent Bricks generates synthetic data for each task to optimize quality. Sourcedocs.databricks.com/mlflow3/genai/eval-monitorread 2026-09-27 |
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| Specialist automation | ||
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Browser & Computer Use Browser, desktop, or remote/local computer control for workflows that cannot be handled through stable APIs alone. |
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AkkaBrowser & Computer Use 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 |
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Databricks Agent BricksBrowser & Computer Use Supervisor Agent carries a sandboxed code execution tool with no internet access and a web search tool, and agents work through APIs, data and MCP. Databricks does not describe browser control or computer use. Sourcedocs.databricks.com/aws/en/agents/agent-bricks/multi-agent-supervisorread 2026-09-27 |
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Pricing snapshot
Sourced from the Index pricing dataset · open each vendor's profile for full detail.
| Pricing | A Akka |
D Databricks Agent Bricks |
|---|---|---|
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Entry price Lowest public entry point |
Free for development. Serverless Hobby is $10 a month and Priority is $0.25 per Akka hour, and self managed production is priced per core on custom terms. | Usage based pricing on Databricks Units (DBUs), billed per second, after a free trial. There is no seat price. |
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Pricing confidence How public the numbers are |
Contact only | Public, partial |
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Billing Primary billing axis |
Two units. Self managed production is licensed per core per year on custom terms, and the serverless Akka Automated Operations plans bill a flat $10 a month on Hobby or per Akka hour on Priority and Critical. Your VPC is priced per region. | Consumption of Databricks Units (DBUs) for compute and Databricks Storage Units (DSUs) for storage, billed per second at price list rates that vary by cloud and product. Model APIs bill per token or by provisioned throughput. |
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Variable cost Workload / overage exposure |
Medium variable cost | High variable cost |
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Free tier / trial Try before you buy |
Free tierTrial
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No free tierTrial
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Buying motion Self-serve vs sales call |
Mixed | Mixed |
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Pricing verified When this pricing was last checked |
Product updates
Newest first, each linked to its source.
Akka
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· Human approval / guardrails
Akka SDK 3.7.0 adds a new guardrail API: a guardrail runs before each model call, on the agent's final reply, or before a function or MCP tool call, and allows or denies it.
Source -
· Observability / auditability
Akka SDK 3.6.6 adds EvalKit, which runs agent evaluations as ordinary JUnit tests that score tool calls, arguments, replies and cost, with model judges and a minimum pass rate gate.
Source
Databricks Agent Bricks
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· MCP / tool calling / API
ChatGPT, Codex, Claude, Claude Code and Cursor can now connect to Databricks MCP servers, including the Genie One MCP server, with default OAuth client IDs.
Source -
· Agent capability
Databricks moved the Agent Bricks Knowledge Assistant and Supervisor Agent to legacy status.
Source -
· MCP / tool calling / API
Databricks released the Agent Bricks CLI in beta, which scaffolds a custom code agent from a LangGraph or OpenAI Agents SDK template, runs it locally and deploys it to the Databricks agent runtime.
Source
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