agentFast vs Cloudflare Agents Starter: Durable Objects vs Durable Execution
Cloudflare's agents-starter is a sharp piece of engineering — MIT, TypeScript/React, 1.3k stars, streaming chat on Workers AI with no API key needed, image input, task scheduling, and three distinct tool patterns including a needsApproval gate. For a chat agent on the edge, it's excellent, and the developer experience is hard to beat.
The word that deserves unpacking is durable, because it means something different in each project.
Durable Objects vs durable execution
Cloudflare's durability is infrastructure durability: Durable Objects give you a consistent, persistent home for state at the edge, with SQLite underneath. That's real and it's good.
agentFast's durability is execution durability: a specific guarantee that a half-finished, human-gated action resolves exactly once. The agent pauses on a risky tool call, the process is killed mid-approval, it comes back, a human approves — and the run resumes from the exact step, with a compare-and-set ensuring the side effect fires once and only once. Different problem, different guarantee.
Put plainly: Durable Objects keep your state alive. Durable execution keeps your refund from happening twice.
Side by side
| Cloudflare agents-starter | agentFast | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Chat agent template (edge) | Agentic infrastructure (trust layer) |
| License & price | MIT, free | Source-available commercial, from $89 |
| Language | TypeScript / React | Python |
| Runs where | Cloudflare Workers + Durable Objects | Your own infrastructure, anywhere Docker runs |
| Best at | Streaming chat UX, scheduling, edge latency | Agents that take consequential actions |
| Human approval | ✓ needsApproval gate | ✓ Durable pause + exactly-once execution |
| Exactly-once on approved action | Not specified | ✓ CAS on execution in Postgres |
| Audit trail | — | ✓ Who approved what, when |
| Guardrails / PII redaction | — | ✓ Included |
| Evals in CI | — | ✓ Thresholds fail the build |
| Model neutrality | Workers AI first | OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Ollama, Groq |
| Portability | Cloudflare platform | Self-hosted, no vendor boundary |
Which should you use?
Building a conversational agent where the win is streaming UX, global latency, and tight Cloudflare integration? Use agents-starter. It is very good at that and MIT-licensed.
Building an agent that issues refunds, sends money, opens pull requests, or emails customers — where the failure mode isn't a slow response but a wrong irreversible action — you need execution guarantees, an approval gate that survives a crash, and an audit trail you can hand to whoever asks. That's agentFast, running in your own infrastructure rather than on someone else's platform.
Comparison based on the public repository and documentation as of July 2026. Check the repo for current capabilities.
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