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Claude Agent SDK vs. Google ADK: for Completely different Usecases

Despite similar names, Anthropic’s Claude Agent SDK and Google’s Agent Development Kit (ADK) are fundamentally different tools addressing distinct problems.

They aren't just two flavors of the same thing. They represent fundamentally different ways to solve the problem.

  • Claude Agent SDK is a local runtime for autonomous execution. Think "Super-Intern" on your laptop.
  • Google ADK is a framework for AI system orchestration.

1. The Core Philosophy: Loop vs. Graph

It really comes down to where the execution loop lives and who controls it.

Claude Agent SDK: The Autonomous Loop

This is basically a programmatic wrapper around Anthropic's "Computer Use" capability (the official term for the model's ability to control a mouse and keyboard). It’s a local runtime that gives the agent direct access to your environment, shell, filesystem, and browser, running with your permissions.

  • Logic: Highly autonomous. The SDK owns the Thought → Bash/Edit → Observation loop. You don't write the steps; you write the goal ("Refactor auth.py"), and it figures out the context window and tool calls.
  • Role: It acts as an autonomous operator. It executes commands directly on the host machine, maintaining context in the shell session and file system.

Google ADK: The Orchestrated Graph

ADK is for building scalable, multi-agent microservices. It cares about system architecture, not individual execution loops.

  • Logic: Developer-defined. You explicitly wire up the control flow Sequential, parallel, loop or Hierarchical patterns. The LLM is just a component you call, not the primary driver of execution.
  • Role: It acts as a workflow engine. It manages the state of a multi-turn process (like a customer support ticket) and delegates steps to stateless agents.

2. Architecture: Local Process vs. Cloud orchestrator

Claude Agent SDK: The Stateful Process

  • Architecture: It runs as a single, stateful process on your machine (or in a CI container). It keeps execution context in RAM and persists changes directly to your local filesystem.
  • Implication: If the process dies, the "thought" history is lost. It is designed for depth (solving one complex task) rather than breadth (serving 10,000 concurrent users).

Google ADK: The Stateless Service

  • Architecture: It is a framework designed to deploy agents as stateless microservices (e.g., on Cloud Run). The compute layer is ephemeral and completely decoupled from the storage layer.
  • Implication: It operates like a serverless function. It spins up to handle a single message, "hydrates" its state from a database (Firestore/Redis), generates a response, saves the new state, and terminates. The conversation persists in the database, while the compute resources are freed immediately.

3. When to Use Which?

Pick Claude SDK for: * The "Nightly Fixer": CI fails → Agent wakes up → Reads logs → Reproduces locally → Commits patch. * The "Researcher": Browses documentation, scrapes pricing pages, compiles a local markdown report. * Refactoring: "Migrate everything in /src from logging to structlog."

Pick Google ADK for: * Customer Support: Handling 5k concurrent users, routing requests between "Billing" and "Tech Support" agents. * Enterprise Workflows: Systems needing strict IAM controls, audit logging, and consistent state management.

4. Scaling Claude for the Enterprise Agentic usecases

The Claude Agent SDK is a local autonomous runtime, not an enterprise orchestration platform.

If you want to use Claude to solve complex enterprise problems (scalable, stateful workflows), simply use it as the intelligence layer inside a framework like Google ADK (via Vertex AI), LangGraph, or similar orchestrators. This allows you to combine Claude's reasoning with the architectural robustness required for business applications.

TL;DR

Need an autonomous agent to control your computer? Claude Agent SDK. Building a SaaS product or platform? Google ADK (or wrap Claude in LangGraph).