Comparison
When to use Anvia, Mastra, OpenAI Agents SDK, and other TypeScript AI frameworks.
Anvia is an application-owned AI runtime for TypeScript teams.
There is no single best TypeScript agent SDK. The right choice depends on who should own the runtime, how much framework surface you want, and whether you want provider-agnostic or provider-specific agent primitives.
The Position
Anvia is for teams building AI features inside an existing TypeScript product.
It gives you provider-agnostic runtime primitives: agents, tools, extractors, pipelines, retrieval, streaming, hooks, and observability. Your application keeps ownership of auth, data, permissions, persistence, queues, deployment, and side effects.
If you want a framework or platform to own more of the agent stack, choose one built around that surface. If you want one provider's agent runtime, tool model, or realtime stack to define the architecture, choose that provider's SDK. If you want graph orchestration, context-augmented data workflows, or UI-first streaming primitives, choose a framework centered on those jobs.
Comparison
| Tool | Center of gravity | Best fit |
|---|---|---|
| Anvia | Application-owned AI runtime | TypeScript apps that need provider-agnostic agents, tools, extraction, pipelines, RAG, and Studio while keeping infrastructure in app code |
| Mastra | All-in-one TypeScript agent framework | Teams that want agents, workflows, memory, tool approval, evals, tracing, and production tooling in one framework |
| OpenAI Agents SDK | OpenAI-maintained agent loop and realtime agent SDK | Products that want a small set of primitives for agent loops, handoffs, guardrails, sessions, tracing, MCP tools, and voice/realtime agents |
| Vercel AI SDK | TypeScript toolkit for AI applications and agents | React, Next.js, Vue, Svelte, Node.js, or similar apps that need provider integration, text/object generation, tool calls, streaming, and chat or generative UI hooks |
| LangChain.js / LangGraph.js | Agent and workflow orchestration ecosystem | Teams that want a larger ecosystem for agents, integrations, graph workflows, durable execution, memory, debugging, deployment, and observability through the LangChain/LangGraph stack |
| LlamaIndex.TS | Context-augmented data and agent workflows | Document-heavy or data-heavy apps that need ingestion, indexing, retrieval, query/chat engines, agents over data, and workflows |
| Google ADK / Genkit | Agent development, flows, evaluation, and deployment tooling | Teams that want Google's agent and app-development tooling, including multi-agent orchestration, graph workflows, evaluation, flow-based APIs, Developer UI, plugins, and flexible deployment paths |
| VoltAgent | Open-source TypeScript agent framework plus VoltOps platform | Teams that want a TypeScript agent framework with memory, RAG, guardrails, tools, MCP, voice, workflows, and optional observability/eval/deployment platform surface |
| Claude Agent SDK | Claude Code as a library for production agents | Products that want to build agents on the Claude Code harness, including built-in file, command, and code-editing tools, with Claude API or supported cloud-provider authentication |
The Boundary
Anvia owns the AI runtime boundary:
- model adapters
- agent execution
- tool calling
- schema validation
- extraction
- streaming events
- pipeline composition
- retrieval primitives
- observer hooks
- local Studio iteration
Your application owns the product boundary:
- users and auth
- databases and memory
- permissions and approvals
- queues and retries
- audit logs
- deployment
- billing, CRM, internal systems, and side effects
This boundary is deliberate. Agents, tools, extractors, and pipelines are ordinary TypeScript objects that can move through your routes, jobs, tests, queues, or local Studio runtime. The AI behavior is portable; the product infrastructure stays in your application.
Decision Rule
Choose Anvia if you want AI behavior to be explicit TypeScript objects inside your app.
Choose something else if you want the framework, provider, or platform to own more of the runtime.
Next
Read Design Philosophy to see why Anvia is shaped around application-owned objects instead of a framework-owned runtime.