AutoGen Alternatives: Where to Migrate Now
Microsoft has put AutoGen into maintenance mode: no new features, community managed, with new users pointed to Microsoft Agent Framework. If you have AutoGen in production, you don't need to panic, but you do need a migration plan. Here are the options.
By the TARDIS Solutions engineering team · Updated
What changed
The AutoGen repository now carries a maintenance-mode notice. It will not receive new features and is community managed going forward. Microsoft Agent Framework, which reached 1.0 for .NET and Python in 2026, is the official successor to both AutoGen and Semantic Kernel, and Microsoft publishes a migration guide from AutoGen.
Your options
| Destination | Migration effort from AutoGen | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Agent Framework | Lowest: official guide, similar concepts | Teams on Azure or .NET, or who want Microsoft support |
| LangGraph | Medium: rewrite conversations as explicit state graphs | Long-running workflows that need checkpoints and human approval |
| CrewAI | Medium: map agents to roles and tasks | Role-based collaboration, quick iteration |
| OpenAI Agents SDK / Pydantic AI | Medium: lighter abstractions, more plain code | Small, focused agents with few moving parts |
| Custom orchestration | Highest up front, lowest long-term dependency | Strict on-prem, latency or cost constraints |
A migration plan that doesn't break production
- Freeze the AutoGen version and pin dependencies. Maintenance mode is not an emergency.
- Inventory what you use: conversation patterns, tools, code execution, memory, human-in-the-loop.
- Build an evaluation set from real production traces before touching code.
- Move tools first. Expose them as MCP servers or plain typed functions so they are framework-neutral.
- Port one workflow to the target framework and run it in shadow mode against the evaluation set.
- Cut over workflow by workflow, keeping rollback to AutoGen until each one passes.
The expensive part of a framework migration is rarely the framework. It is undocumented behaviour in prompts and tools. An evaluation set built from real traces is what makes the migration safe.
Should you just stay on AutoGen?
For a stable internal tool with no new requirements, staying pinned for a while is reasonable. For anything customer-facing, regulated, or still growing, plan the move: you will want security fixes, new model support and protocol features like MCP that a maintenance-mode project may not keep up with.
Where TARDIS fits
We migrate agent systems between frameworks as a fixed-scope engagement: inventory, evaluation set from your traces, tools moved to MCP, workflow-by-workflow cutover with rollback. We also run our own multi-agent runtime, Navratna, so we have handled these trade-offs in production ourselves.
Frequently asked questions
Is AutoGen deprecated?
It is in maintenance mode rather than deleted: no new features, community managed. Microsoft recommends Microsoft Agent Framework for new projects.
Is Microsoft Agent Framework the same as AutoGen?
No. It is a new framework that brings together ideas from AutoGen and Semantic Kernel, with a migration guide for both.
How long does a migration take?
For a handful of workflows with an existing evaluation set, typically a few weeks. Without evaluations, budget time to build them first.