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LangChain

Parlant vs. LangChain​

Think of LangChain as a Swiss Army knife for AI applications. It excels at connecting different AI operations together, helping you build complex workflows where one operation feeds into another. LangGraph takes this a step further by adding state management, making it particularly good at handling complex, multi-step processes where you need to keep track of where you are in the workflow.

On the other hand, Parlant focuses specifically on one crucial task: building production-grade customer-facing agents. While LangChain and LangGraph help you orchestrate complex AI operations, Parlant helps you shape and control how your agent actually behaves in conversations with customers.

When to Use What​

LangChain​

You might reach for LangChain when you're building a system that needs to perform a series of AI operations - perhaps analyzing documents, then summarizing them, then generating responses based on those summaries. It's particularly valuable in research and prototyping, where you need the flexibility to experiment with different combinations of AI capabilities.

LangGraph shines when your application needs to maintain clearly structured state transitions, like data processing. In such cases, structure and rigidity is actually useful. However, in customer-facing scenarios, it can lead to awkward conversational experiences.

Parlant​

Parlant is your go-to when you're building customer-facing agents that need to behave consistently and reliably. If you're working with business stakeholders who need to refine how the agent communicates, or if you need precise control over how your agent handles different customer scenarios, Parlant is designed specifically for these challenges.

Working Together​

Parlant and LangChain aren't mutually exclusive - they can complement each other well. You might use LangChain to handle complex document processing in the backend, while using Parlant to manage how your agent communicates those results to users. Or you might use LangGraph to orchestrate a complex workflow while letting Parlant handle the customer-facing conversations within that workflow.