I like it quite a bit. Imo it's sort of like the "Flask" of frameworks. It's pretty easy to get started with and has a pretty pluggable ecosystem where you can choose models, providers, tools without much lock-in.

It has AWS weight behind it (for better or worse) and has a slight skew towards AWS solutions but it's still trivial to skip those.

Krew.ai is another one not on your list. It's fairly comprehensive but it was too "enterprisy" and too heavy on proprietary jargon for all the components imo. I think the tech is ok but the docs and terminology is very dense.

I also briefly looked at LangGraph and it's fairly straight forward and provides a lot of the same abstractions and interfaces as Strands but it felt too easy to accidentally miss them and end up reinventing the wheel. Put another way, it was easy to accidentally miss the abstraction and wade into DIY primitive territory. That may be a feature to some, but I thought it would be a distraction for quick adoption at a small company.

When I checked a few months ago, LangGraph, Krew, and OpenAI Agents SDK had better out of the box integration with common observability/monitoring/tracing solutions. Strands has pretty robust Otel support but not all providers had implemented the Otel AI spec at the time so it required some adapters/wrapper code (plenty of community examples online, just slightly less plug and play)

At the time, I don't think Claude Agents SDK existed yet or it was very new. I skipped OpenAI SDK because we wanted a multi-vendor solution. Pydantic Agents was too new so I skipped that