Agent Development Kit (ADK) vs Microsoft Agent Framework

These are the same kind of thing from two clouds: free, open-source code libraries for building LLM agents and multi-agent workflows. Google's ADK (Apache-2.0) leans toward Gemini and Google Cloud; Microsoft Agent Framework (MIT) is the successor to Semantic Kernel and AutoGen and leans toward Azure and Foundry. Both run anywhere and talk to other vendors' models, so the deciding factor is usually your language and which cloud you already pay for.

SDK vs ADK, since people ask

An SDK like Google's google-genai package is a client: it sends a prompt to a model and hands back the reply. ADK (Agent Development Kit) sits on top of it (google-genai is a core dependency of the Python package) and adds the agent parts: tools, sessions and memory, multi-agent composition, a local dev UI, evaluation, and deploy commands. Microsoft's framework plays the same role above its model clients.

Languages

ADK lists Python, TypeScript, Go, Java and Kotlin, each in its own repo. Python needs 3.11 or newer and installs with pip install google-adk. ADK 2.0 added graph workflows, and the TypeScript 2.0 release is marked GA.

Microsoft Agent Framework reached 1.0 for .NET and Python on 3 April 2026, with stable APIs for agents, middleware, memory, workflows and the sequential, concurrent, handoff, group chat and Magentic-One orchestrations. A Go version exists but is still in public preview. If your team writes C#, this is the one with a first-class answer; ADK has no .NET version.

Models and where it runs

ADK says it's optimized for Gemini, but its docs cover Claude, OpenAI, Ollama, vLLM and LiteLLM. You can deploy it to Docker, Cloud Run, GKE or Google's Agent Runtime, or run it on your own servers.

Microsoft's 1.0 post lists connectors for Foundry, Azure OpenAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon Bedrock, Gemini and Ollama. Its quickstarts assume a Foundry project and Azure credentials, and the Foundry hosted-agent pieces were still marked preview at 1.0. Both support MCP tools. ADK documents A2A quickstarts in four languages; Microsoft's post said A2A 1.0 support was coming soon.

If you're moving off Semantic Kernel or AutoGen, Microsoft publishes migration guides for both, which makes it the obvious path.