LangGraph
Low-level graph-based agent orchestration from the LangChain team — explicit state, loops, and human-in-the-loop control.
Use when
- Engineering teams who need fine control over agent control flow and state
- Long-running agents with loops, branching, and human-in-the-loop steps
- Teams already in the LangChain ecosystem wanting low-level orchestration primitives
Operational upside
- Explicit control over agent flow — nodes, edges, and shared state instead of a hidden agent loop
- Graph state model handles cycles, branching, and human-in-the-loop pauses cleanly
- Checkpointing and persistence through a configured checkpointer for resumable agents
- Model-agnostic — works with OpenAI, Anthropic, open, and local models via adapters
- MIT licensed and self-hostable; runs as a Python or TypeScript library
Avoid or plan for
- Code-first with a real learning curve — non-developers should not start here
- Lower-level than most frameworks; you assemble more of the plumbing yourself
- Naming overlap with LangChain confuses newcomers about which to use when
- Smaller ready-made connector catalog than the LangChain framework it sits under
- Overkill for a single LLM call or a simple linear chain
What it is
LangGraph is a low-level orchestration framework from the LangChain team for building stateful, controllable agents. It models an agent as a graph of nodes and edges over shared state. With a configured checkpointer, it can persist checkpoints for loops, branching, human-in-the-loop pauses, and recovery — the control-flow primitives higher-level frameworks tend to hide.
Who it’s for
Choose LangGraph when you think in graphs and want to own every step of the agent’s control flow: backend and platform teams building long-running, resumable agents, and teams already on LangChain that have outgrown the default agent loop. If you want a visual canvas or a one-line agent, start elsewhere.
Frontier verification — checkpointing is not exactly-once execution
LangGraph’s persistence documentation describes checkpoints associated with execution threads. That can support resume, inspection, and human-in-the-loop flows. It does not make a payment, database write, or message delivery exactly once.
Temporal now documents an integration path for LangGraph workloads. Add that runtime only when durable coordination across failures is a separate requirement from graph-state persistence. Activities may retry, so external writes still need idempotency.
Decision rule: use LangGraph checkpoints for graph progress; add durable execution only when the failure and operational boundary justify a second runtime.
Current sources: LangGraph persistence and Temporal’s LangGraph integration brief. Verified 2026-09-13.
Security note — verified 2026-09-23
An official High advisory affects the Python langgraph-sdk package, versions 0.1.45 through 0.4.3: actions= restrictions on certain resource-scoped custom-auth decorators can be applied incorrectly. Only deployments using those affected Python authorization patterns are in scope; this is not a claim about every LangGraph application or the framework’s version. The fix is in langgraph-sdk 0.4.4. The advisory lists no workaround, so affected deployments should upgrade.
FAQ
- Is LangGraph free?
- LangGraph has a free tier or open-source edition. See pricing details on the official site for paid features and usage limits.
- What is LangGraph best for?
- Engineering teams who need fine control over agent control flow and state Long-running agents with loops, branching, and human-in-the-loop steps Teams already in the LangChain ecosystem wanting low-level orchestration primitives
- What are the main downsides of LangGraph?
- Code-first with a real learning curve — non-developers should not start here Lower-level than most frameworks; you assemble more of the plumbing yourself Naming overlap with LangChain confuses newcomers about which to use when
- Who should use LangGraph?
- Low-level graph-based agent orchestration from the LangChain team — explicit state, loops, and human-in-the-loop control. See our review for the full pros and cons.