Framework Comparison
| Feature | Helix | AutoGen | CrewAI | LangGraph |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost Governance | ✓ Hard budget limits + semantic caching | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Memory | ✓ Multi-tier (short-term, episodic, WAL-backed) | Partial | Partial | ✗ |
| Semantic Caching | ✓ Tier 1 embedding-based cache | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Multi-Agent Teams | ✓ Handoffs + group chat | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| YAML Pipelines | ✓ Task + workflow YAML | ✗ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Built-in Eval Suite | ✓ 6 scorers + regression gate | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ |
| MCP Tools | ✓ Native MCP client | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Guardrails | ✓ Prompt injection, HITL, audit log | Partial | Partial | ✗ |
| LangGraph Compat | ✓ StateGraph, StateGraph.START |
✗ | ✗ | Native |
| Framework Wrappers | ✓ LangChain, CrewAI, AutoGen | N/A | ✓ | ✗ |
When to choose Helix: - You need hard cost control over multi-step agents (budget overruns are expensive in production) - Caching matters — repeating queries with semantic similarity wastes money - You want production observability (traces, eval gates, failure replay) - Your team already uses CrewAI/AutoGen/LangChain and needs governance overlay