Checked 4 October 2026. Figures for LangGraph come from its own docs, repository and package registries.
At a glance
| Property | OpenWOP | LangGraph |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A wire protocol (REST and Server-Sent Events) plus a conformance suite | A library plus a server runtime (docs) |
| Licence | Spec CC BY 4.0, code Apache 2.0 | Library MIT; the Agent Server package is Elastic-2.0, source-available (PyPI) |
| Languages | Any language that speaks HTTP; SDKs for TypeScript, Python and Go | Python and JavaScript/TypeScript |
| Where state lives | An append-only event log per run (events) | Checkpoints per thread (persistence) |
| Human approval | Interrupts with an approval vocabulary, resumed by token (interrupt) | interrupt() and Command(resume=…) (docs) |
| Replay and fork | Fork any run from any event; a host that advertises replay must not repeat side effects (replay) | Replay and fork from a checkpoint (time travel) |
| Spec other runtimes implement | Yes, with a public conformance suite; three v2 hosts so far, all run by the project or a sibling organisation | Agent Protocol (OpenAPI); every listed implementation is LangChain's own (repo) |
| Hosted option | A reference app at app.openwop.dev | LangSmith Deployment (docs) |
| Adoption | New: the spec repo started in May 2026 | About 42,700 GitHub stars and 44 million PyPI downloads in the last month (pypistats) |
When to choose LangGraph
- You are building one agent application in Python or JavaScript and want to write the agent logic in a framework.
- You want a widely used tool with a large community, a debugger with time travel (LangSmith Studio) and built-in evaluation.
- You want to embed orchestration in your own process with no separate server.
When OpenWOP fits
- You need several hosts, or several vendors' tools, to agree on what a run is: how it starts, streams, waits for a person, and replays.
- You want approval, fork and replay rules written into a contract that a conformance suite checks, rather than defined by one library's behaviour.
- You are building a runtime yourself and want clients to work against it without custom integration.
Be clear about OpenWOP's stage: it is months old, has one steward, and no independent organisation has implemented a host yet.
Using them together
An OpenWOP node can run any code, so a LangGraph agent could run inside a workflow step, and an OpenWOP host could call a deployed LangGraph agent over A2A, which both support. Neither integration has been built or tested yet.
Common questions
Is OpenWOP a LangGraph alternative?
Only partly. LangGraph is where you write agents; OpenWOP is the contract a host exposes for running them, so you could write a step's agent logic with LangGraph or anything else.
Doesn't Agent Protocol already standardise agent runs?
It standardises runs, threads and a store over OpenAPI, and LangGraph implements a superset. OpenWOP also specifies interrupts, fork semantics with side-effect suppression and a conformance suite, though it also has no independent host yet.
Can LangGraph time travel do what OpenWOP fork does?
Both let you go back to an earlier point and run again. OpenWOP's distinguishing rule is that a replay must not perform external side effects a second time; we found no equivalent documented guarantee in LangGraph as of this check.