agentFast vs Google's Agent Starter Pack: Neutral vs Cloud-Locked
Google's agent-starter-pack is the most credible thing in this category by raw adoption — 6.5k stars, Apache-2.0, Python, with real CI/CD, Vertex AI evaluation, observability, and a RAG data pipeline. If you are already all-in on Google Cloud, it is a genuinely excellent paved road, and you should probably use it.
The trade-off is the road only goes one place.
The lock-in question
agent-starter-pack deploys to Cloud Run or Agent Engine, evaluates through Vertex AI, and assumes Google Cloud throughout. That's not a flaw — it's the entire point of a first-party starter pack, and it's why the DX is so good. But it means your prompts, tool outputs, traces, and evaluation data live inside one vendor's boundary, and your agent's portability is limited to what that platform supports.
agentFast is built on the opposite assumption: it runs entirely in your infrastructure, on any model, behind whichever SDK you already picked. For teams handling money, health records, or regulated data, “our prompts and audit logs never leave our boundary” isn't a preference — it's the thing that gets the deployment approved.
Side by side
| Google agent-starter-pack | agentFast | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Cloud deployment templates | Agentic infrastructure (trust layer) |
| License & price | Apache-2.0, free | Source-available commercial, from $89 |
| Runs where | Google Cloud (Cloud Run / Agent Engine) | Your own infrastructure, anywhere Docker runs |
| SDKs | Google ADK, LangGraph, custom ReAct | LangGraph, CrewAI, Claude Agent SDK, OpenAI Agents SDK, Vanilla |
| Model neutrality | Google-first | OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Ollama, Groq |
| CI/CD | ✓ Cloud Build / GitHub Actions | Your pipeline; evals gate the build |
| Evaluation | ✓ Vertex AI evaluation | ✓ Evals in CI, thresholds fail the build |
| Observability | ✓ Google Cloud native | ✓ OTEL + LangSmith export, vendor-neutral |
| Durable human-in-the-loop | — | ✓ Survives a crash, exactly-once |
| Audit trail for approvals | — | ✓ Who approved what, when |
| Guardrails / PII redaction | — | ✓ Included |
| Project status | Maintenance mode; successor is agents-cli | Active |
Which should you use?
On Google Cloud, with no data-residency constraint, and mostly needing deployment plumbing? Use agent-starter-pack — though note it's in maintenance mode, with development moved to agents-cli, so check which one you're actually adopting.
If you need the agent to run in your own cloud, stay portable across models and SDKs, and — critically — pause for a human before it does something irreversible in a way that survives a crash, that's the gap agentFast fills. The two aren't mutually exclusive either: agentFast is deliberately SDK-agnostic, so it can wrap an ADK or LangGraph agent you've already written.
Comparison based on the public repository and documentation as of July 2026. Check the repo for current status.
agentFast is the production layer — memory, 50 tools, observability, evals, guardrails, human-in-the-loop — for LangGraph, CrewAI, the Claude & OpenAI Agent SDKs & Vanilla. Own it for life.
Get agentFast — from $89