213 AI developers voted across a competitive and fast-evolving category. Here is what the results reveal about the future of agent development.
The March 2026 IT Brand Pulse AI Brand Leader survey asked 213 members of the AI developer community to vote for Market Leader and Intelligence & Innovation Leader in AI Agent Development Frameworks, one of 26 products in the AI Engineering stack. LangGraph took the top position in both categories, receiving 30.0% of votes for Market Leader and 35.2% for Intelligence & Innovation Leader. CrewAI finished second in both pillars with 22.1%.
With nearly 48% of votes distributed across AutoGen, Semantic Kernel, OpenAI Agents SDK, and others, the market remains highly fragmented, with multiple frameworks gaining traction across different use cases and developer preferences. The IT Brand Pulse analyst team expects these categories to increasingly converge with LLMOps and platform layers as agent-based systems become the dominant paradigm for building AI applications.
What Are AI Agent Development Frameworks?
IT Brand Pulse defines AI Agent Development Frameworks as software frameworks that enable developers to build, orchestrate, and deploy autonomous or semi-autonomous AI agents. These frameworks provide capabilities such as multi-step reasoning, tool use, memory management, planning, workflow orchestration, and integration with external systems, forming the core layer for developing next-generation AI applications built around agents rather than static prompts. AI Agent Development Frameworks sits within the Development sub-layer of the broader AI Engineering stack, alongside AI Model Development Frameworks, Foundation Model Platforms, LLMOps Platforms, and AI App Builder Platforms.
Download the Brand Leader Report for AI Agent Development Frameworks.
