agentfield vs paperclip
Open-source control plane that runs AI agents as microservices: write plain Python/Go/TS functions, get REST endpoints with routing, queues, retries, memory and tracing — one laptop to 10k agents. — versus — Open-source control plane for running fleets of heterogeneous AI agents as a "company" — bring your own agent, assign goals, org charts, budgets, governance, and an audited ticket system.
Both are open control planes for fleets of agents, attacking opposite ends: paperclip is the governance layer over agents you already have (BYO agent, goals, org charts, budgets, audited tickets); agentfield is the build-and-run backend where agents are SDK-written microservices with REST endpoints, queues and retries. Govern existing agents → paperclip; build the agent backend itself → agentfield.
| agentfield | paperclip | |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | 2.4k | 74k |
| Forks | 374 | 14k |
| Language | Go | TypeScript |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Last activity | yesterday | today |
| Topics | agents, orchestration | agents, orchestration |
| Curated connections | 4 | 7 |
agentfield — the curator's take
The 'agents as a backend' play: write plain functions (no DSL, no graph wiring), and the Go control plane turns each into a REST endpoint any service can call — with fan-out to thousands of parallel agents, queues, retries, versioned deploys, observability and identity/audit built in. Reach for it when agents must be production infrastructure callable by frontends, cron jobs and other services — not a chat window. NOT for notebook experiments or a single local agent (a control plane + SDK is real operational commitment), and it won't give you reasoning-pattern libraries — you still design the agent logic it hosts. Its prompt-to-backend flow (/agentfield in Claude Code/Cursor) is a nice on-ramp, but evaluate the runtime, not the demo.
paperclip — the curator's take
Reach for Paperclip when you run many agents across providers 24/7 and need a boss layer — budgets that hard-stop, org charts, goal alignment, audit trail, mobile monitoring. Sweet spot: "20 Claude Code tabs, lost track of who does what." NOT the tool to build an agent (it orchestrates ones you already have), and overkill for a single agent or one linear pipeline. It's a control plane, not a framework.