langchainjs
The agent engineering platform
The Lens
This is the framework that connects your code to LLMs. It handles the plumbing: talking to OpenAI/Anthropic/local models, managing conversation memory, chaining prompts together, and calling tools.
What's free: Everything. MIT license, no paid tier in the library itself. LangSmith (their observability platform) has a free tier with limits.
LangChain JS has become the default starting point for JS/TS AI applications. Active development, huge community. The abstractions for chains, agents, and retrieval are battle-tested.
The catch: LangChain is famously over-abstracted. Simple things that take 5 lines with the OpenAI SDK directly take 20 lines through LangChain. The abstraction layers add latency and debugging complexity. If you're just calling an API and formatting the response, you don't need this. It earns its keep when you're building complex agent workflows with tool calling, retrieval-augmented generation (feeding your own documents to AI), or multi-step reasoning chains.
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Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
fully free### What's Free The entire LangChain JS library. MIT license, no restrictions. All chains, agents, retrievers, memory, and model integrations are free.
### What Costs Money (Ecosystem) - **LangSmith** (tracing/debugging): Free tier with 5,000 traces/mo. Pro at $39/mo per seat for unlimited traces. - **LangGraph Cloud** (hosted agent deployment): Pricing varies, starts around $50/mo. - **The LLM APIs you connect to**: OpenAI ($0.002-0.06/1K tokens), Anthropic (similar), etc. This is your real cost.
### The Hidden Cost LangChain's abstractions mean more tokens per request (system prompts, chain formatting). A direct API call might use 500 tokens where LangChain uses 800 for the same result. At scale, that's 60% more on your LLM bill.
### When to Pay for LangSmith When you're debugging agent behavior in production and need to see exactly what prompts were sent and what came back. The free tier is enough for development. Pay at $39/seat when you're running production agents and need full observability.
Library is free forever. LangSmith tracing costs $39/seat/mo when you need production observability. Your real expense is the LLM API bill.
Similar Tools
License: MIT License
Use freely, including commercial. Just keep the license.
Commercial use: ✓ Yes
About
- Owner
- LangChain (Organization)
- Backed by
- Sequoia, Benchmark
- Stars
- 17,641
- Forks
- 3,159
- emerging
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