CrewAI vs Orchestrator Zero
oz0 records agent jobs running on your infrastructure. CrewAI provides agent teams and flows, with AMP for deployment and management. oz0 focuses on operating agents across your machines, with tenant rules, a model gateway and a verifiable audit trail.
What CrewAI is
CrewAI is an open-source Python framework for crews of role-based agents and event-driven flows. CrewAI AMP deploys crews and flows to CrewAI's managed cloud, with tracing, a visual Crew Studio, triggers and human review, and CrewAI Factory runs the same platform on your own Kubernetes cluster.
docs-platform.crewai.com- Runs
- Self-hosted or managed
- Checked
- 27 October 2026
Side by side.
CrewAI's ratings come from its own pages. A column's name opens its definition and how Orchestrator Zero does it. How we rated
Where it runs
Any machine you own
Yes
DocsConditional: Factory on your Kubernetes
AMP runs crews on CrewAI's infrastructure, and Factory, the Enterprise edition, on your own Kubernetes cluster; the framework runs on any machine, but outside the platform.
Linux, macOS and Windows
Conditional: Framework only; AMP on Linux
The open-source framework installs natively on macOS, Linux and Windows, but crews deployed through AMP or Factory run as containers on AMD64 Kubernetes nodes.
Self-hosted control plane
Yes
DocsConditional: Factory, Enterprise plan
You can run the platform yourself only as CrewAI Factory, with the Enterprise plan; the free plan is the hosted service.
No inbound ports
Yes
DocsNo: Crews serve an HTTP API
Each deployed crew is started by a request to its URL, so calls go into the pods that run the agents.
Fleet operations
Yes
DocsConditional: One K8s node pool, all crews
Factory can pin crew pods to a labelled node pool, but the setting applies to every crew at once, with no machine join, block or per-crew routing.
Durability
Durable runs
Conditional: Manual resume from checkpoint
The framework writes a checkpoint after each finished task and skips completed tasks on restore, but a run continues only when you start it again from a checkpoint, and automatic checkpoint writes are best-effort.
Governance
Tool policy outside the model
Conditional: Tool hooks you write
Tool call hooks in the framework can block or rewrite each call, but the rules are Python code in the crew; no admin-set allow, approve or deny policy is documented for AMP.
Approvals in chat
Conditional: Email and UI; chat via webhook
A flow pauses at a human feedback step, answered by email, in the AMP dashboard or through the API; Slack or Teams need a webhook you build.
Tool snapshots
Yes
DocsNot documented
The MCP security guide warns about misleading tool metadata and recommends trusted servers. A built-in check that blocks changed tool definitions pending approval is not documented.
Tenants built in
Yes
DocsYes: Organizations; RBAC Enterprise
AMP separates work by organization, with roles and per-automation access, and Factory can give each organization its own Kubernetes namespace; role-based access control is on the Enterprise plan.
Cost
Budgets that stop a run
Conditional: Cost estimates, no spend cap
Traces show token usage and an estimated cost per run, and crews can cap requests per minute and agent iterations, but no spend limit in money is documented.
Security
Provider keys off the workers
Yes
DocsConditional: Injected into crew env
Keys can come from cloud secret stores, but the platform writes the resolved value into the crew's process environment, so the agent process holds it.
Sandbox with an egress allowlist
Conditional: External sandbox required
CrewAI removed its built-in code interpreter and directs users to sandbox services such as E2B or Modal. An outbound host allowlist enforced by CrewAI itself is not documented.
Audit and compliance
Tamper-evident audit trail
Conditional: Audit logs, no hash chain
AMP keeps what it calls immutable audit logs of human review decisions, but no hash chain or verification is documented.
Erasure by key
Conditional: Forget a memory scope
The framework's memory can be scoped per customer and deleted by scope, but no per-person encryption keys or deletion across traces and backups are documented.
Retention with legal hold
Conditional: Trace retention, no hold
Factory sets how many weeks trace data is kept, but no legal hold is documented, and no retention setting is documented for hosted AMP.
Openness
Model provider choice
Yes
DocsYes
Native integrations cover OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Azure, AWS Bedrock and Snowflake Cortex, and local models run through Ollama.
MCP and A2A
Yes
DocsYes
Agents use MCP servers as tools, delegate to remote A2A agents and can serve as A2A agents; A2A serving on AMP is an early release.
Where CrewAI is stronger.
Hosted service with a free plan
AMP runs crews on CrewAI's cloud with nothing to install, and the Basic plan is free with 50 workflow executions a month.
docs.crewai.comVisual builder for crews
Crew Studio builds automations from a prompt and a visual workflow editor, and CrewAI says the editor exports to Python.
docs-platform.crewai.comEnterprise single sign-on
The Enterprise plan adds SSO with Microsoft Entra and Okta, and Factory documents Auth0, Keycloak and WorkOS as well.
crewai.comMicrosoft Teams triggers
AMP can start a crew from a new Microsoft Teams chat and connects to Outlook, SharePoint and OneDrive. Orchestrator Zero has a Teams plugin, tested only against a stand-in so far, and no other Microsoft 365 plugins.
docs-platform.crewai.com
Differences to examine.
Compare the scope, conditions and editions in the source notes.
- Any machine you own
- Linux, macOS and Windows
- Self-hosted control plane
- No inbound ports
- Fleet operations
- Budgets that stop a run
- Provider keys off the workers
- Tamper-evident audit trail
- Erasure by key
Using both
CrewAI agents can delegate tasks to remote A2A agents, so a crew can hand a step to an Orchestrator Zero agent through its Agent Card.
Based on documentation; this pairing has not been tested.
Find your first task.
Explore an example or read the public Docs preview. Software access is coming soon.