Agentic Index

AutoGPT vs CrewAI (2026)

AutoGPT and CrewAI are both well known open source agent projects, now at different maturity points: AutoGPT, the original autonomous agent phenomenon, is free to self host with your own model keys, with a hosted cloud offering Pro, Max, and Team subscriptions plus a pay as you go credit wallet and deliberately no free cloud tier, while CrewAI is widely used for production multi agent orchestration, MIT licensed and free, with a hosted platform from a free Basic plan of fifty executions to custom enterprise pricing. That verdict is the Agentic Index coverage score, graded from each vendor's own published materials.

For shipping multi agent systems in 2026, CrewAI is the safer bet; AutoGPT remains the tinkerer's platform with a workflow oriented cloud.

On the Agentic Index self hosted platform ranking, AutoGPT and CrewAI both clear the bar: each documents both containment capabilities in full. 171 of the 554 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. AutoGPT and CrewAI 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 955 researched vendors. No vendor pays for placement and no vendor has reviewed this page. How this evidence is graded

Choose AutoGPT if

  • Visual workflow style agent building on the hosted platform appeals.
  • Self hosting the original autonomous agent stack fits your experiments.
  • Credit wallet economics match your intermittent usage.

Choose CrewAI if

  • Production multi agent orchestration with enterprise adoption is the goal.
  • Role and task crew structure maps to your architecture.
  • A hosted path from a free Basic plan to enterprise terms fits your growth.
Feature
A
AutoGPT
C
CrewAI
Action & orchestration

Integrations & Tool Calling

Ability to connect agents to real systems through native integrations, OAuth-authenticated actions, custom tools, APIs, webhooks, or MCP-compatible tools.

Workflow Orchestration

Ability to sequence, branch, retry, route, and combine deterministic workflow nodes with autonomous agent steps.

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.

Knowledge & context

Knowledge Grounding & RAG

Ability to ground agent behavior in company data through document ingestion, retrieval, external knowledge APIs, semantic search, or RAG layers.

Memory & State Persistence

Ability to persist context across a run, conversation, workflow, user, team, or longer-term memory layer.

Control & trust

Human Oversight & Guardrails

Approval steps, consent checkpoints, escalation rules, structured guardrails, policy constraints, and pause/resume controls.

Security, Identity & Governance

RBAC, SSO, auditability, encryption, least-privilege tool access, compliance posture, and data handling policy.

Observability & Auditability

Traces, logs, execution histories, metrics, audit events, and debugging detail for production agent behavior.

Deployment & Data Residency

Deployment modes and options, including SaaS, dedicated cloud, VPC, on-prem, hybrid, local runtime, and self-hosting.

Solution readiness

Prebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs

Ready-made workflows, packaged employees, templates, blueprints, industry solutions, and role-specific agents that reduce time-to-value.

Platform extensibility

Model Flexibility & Routing

Ability to work across multiple foundation models, route tasks to different models, or let buyers bring their own providers and keys.

APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility

Composability layer: stable APIs, SDKs, MCP tool consumption/serving, custom tools, and integration into internal systems.

Testing, Debugging & Optimization

Testing, debugging, scoring, retries, fallbacks, quality gates, and optimization loops for improving agent workflows before and after deployment.

Specialist automation

Browser & Computer Use

Browser, desktop, or remote/local computer control for workflows that cannot be handled through stable APIs alone.

Pricing snapshot

Sourced from the Index pricing dataset · open each vendor's profile for full detail.

Pricing
A
AutoGPT
C
CrewAI

Entry price

Lowest public entry point

Free to self host the open source platform with the customer's own model API keys and infrastructure. The hosted cloud starts at Pro, $50 per month billed monthly with a 7 day free trial, with Max at $320 per month. The open source framework is free under MIT. The hosted Basic plan is free with 50 workflow executions a month, and Enterprise is custom priced.

Pricing confidence

How public the numbers are

Public, partial Public, partial

Billing

Primary billing axis

The Pro or Max subscription covers Otto and Expert chat usage, with Max at 8.5 times Pro. Workflow runs draw from a prepaid credit wallet at the same rate on every plan, with a spending cap per Expert. Workflow executions. Basic is capped at a monthly count, and Enterprise executions are sized to the workflow and priced by quote.

Variable cost

Workload / overage exposure

High variable cost Medium variable cost

Free tier / trial

Try before you buy

Free tierTrial
Free tierTrial

Buying motion

Self-serve vs sales call

Self-serve Sales call

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