What is the difference between Embabel and Kotlin Koog?

[refaatcrafts]

Hi everyone 👋

I’ve been exploring JVM-based AI agent frameworks and came across both Embabel and Koog.

At first glance, both seem to enable building agents with Kotlin/Java and provide features like workflows, tool integrations, and LLM support. But I’d love to understand the key differences in philosophy, design, and use cases between the two.

Some questions that come to mind:

• How does Embabel’s planning (GOAP, Actions, Goals, Plans) compare to Koog’s agent workflows?
• Which one is more suitable for enterprise use cases vs. prototyping?

Thanks in advanced!

[johnsonr]

Koog looks like a nice project and far superior to anything from the Python ecosystem.

I haven't taken a close look recently but some differences that come to mind:

• I believe Koog uses nodes and edges like LangGraph, with explicit wiring. This is less dynamic and flexible than Embabel's GOAP planning.
• Both Embabel and Koog should be suitable for building enterprise applications. Embabel has very close integration with Spring which is helpful here.
• Tool support looks very similar, with an annotation model (but then there are only so many ways to do it)
• Embabel is a JVM framework whereas Koog is a Kotlin framework. Thus while Embabel is written in Kotlin and has a Kotlin DSL, it aims to be idiomatic for Java developers (who are most of our user base) and is very nice to use from Java

I think the choice is obviously Embabel for Java developers, especially if they're using Spring. For Kotlin developers it probably comes down to whether Koog's explicit node-edge wiring is what they're looking for. I believe Embabel ultimately offers more potential to build rich systems by adding actions and goals, without changing what's there.

[refaatcrafts]

Thanks a lot for the detailed response 🙏
Really appreciate you breaking down the differences so clearly.
I’m excited to dive deeper into it, explore more, and hopefully contribute to the project too.

[renatojavagarcia]

@johnsonr I have the same question. I'm studying both, but I like the way Embabel works better.
My only question is about managing the message history (memory), which is resent to LLM with each communication. I started using only Springai, but I realized that it alone is quite limited. Langchain4j is more complete, though.
How does memory management work in Embabel? I saw that Koog can compress and generate fact data, thus optimizing communication. How should we manage this in Embabel? Is there something out of the box?

[johnsonr]

In Embabel it's not about conversational memory so much as domain objects that are stored in the blackboard during the flow. You can store Conversation objects but that's more an application level concern, hence we don't presently bother with compacting. The Koog fact data is an interesting approach. We're exploring knowledge graphs for such needs. I think that's the ultimate solution.