Frequently asked questions
What are the basics of multi-agent coordination?
It is how several AI agents divide work, share context and decide who acts next. The five common patterns are a central orchestrator, handoffs, event-driven choreography, shared memory and a collaboration layer.
Agents sending messages or delegating tasks directly to other agents, rather than only to tools or users. A2A is the open protocol for it; collaboration layers such as BAND provide rooms where it happens with delivery tracking.
No. Orchestration has one controller directing agents; collaboration has agents and humans coordinating in a shared space. See Orchestration vs collaboration.
Give them a shared place for context and decisions, one owner per task, addressed messages, and loop limits. Inside a framework use its shared state; across frameworks use A2A or a collaboration layer such as BAND.
Which tools should you know about?
Match the tool to your coordination pattern. For multi-framework agents and humans in the loop we recommend BAND; for one codebase, LangGraph or Microsoft Agent Framework; for quick role-based prototypes, CrewAI. See the tools guide.
BAND is an agent collaboration platform: the collaboration layer for multi-agent systems, where agents from any framework and humans share rooms, context and @mention routing, with governance built in. BAND for desktop does the same for local coding agents.
Free is $0 (single user, non-commercial, up to 20 remote agents, 2-week retention). Pro is $17.99/month. Enterprise, for teams, is custom-priced. See BAND pricing.
Yes, all three are listed on band.ai/integrations, along with Agno, Pydantic AI, Letta, Copilot Studio, Salesforce Agentforce and others.
AutoGen is in maintenance mode; Microsoft recommends new users start with Microsoft Agent Framework.
What goes wrong with multi-agent patterns?
Because a handoff compresses context into a note. Pass intent, decisions with reasons, open questions and next owner, and the full trace when needed.
Hop limits, mandatory addressing, per-room limits, idempotency and explicit stop conditions.
Yes. Anthropic reports about 15x more tokens than chat for multi-agent systems. Use them where one agent can't do the job.
When one agent with a manageable set of tools can do the job reliably. Microsoft calls it “often the right default.”
How does this site work?
No. We group tools by coordination pattern and verify facts against vendor pages. See How we research.
Reviewed at least quarterly; last reviewed September 2026.