The Decision Is About Trade-offs, Not Best Practices
There is no universally correct answer. Managed agent services like Claude Managed Agents or similar hosted environments reduce operational overhead dramatically. Self-built orchestration using frameworks like the Claude Agent SDK or LangGraph gives you control, flexibility, and cost optimization.
The right choice depends on where you are in product development, your team's operational capacity, and your cost model.
When Managed Services Make Sense
Early-Stage Products
If you're still validating whether the agent approach works for your use case, managed services let you test faster. The operational overhead of building reliable orchestration — retry logic, state management, observability — is real engineering work. Don't pay that cost until you know the direction is right.
Small Engineering Teams
Managed agent execution services include the things that are genuinely hard to get right: reliable state persistence, retry with backoff, parallel execution. A 3-person team shipping an AI feature shouldn't also be building distributed execution infrastructure.
When SLA Matters From Day One
If you're shipping an agent to paying customers, you need reliability guarantees. Managed services provide these. Building them yourself is possible but takes months to get right.
When Self-Built Orchestration Makes Sense
When Data Cannot Leave Your Infrastructure
Compliance requirements in healthcare (HIPAA), finance (SOC 2 with data residency), and government contexts may prohibit sending data to hosted execution environments. Self-hosted orchestration with local or private-cloud LLMs is the only option.
At High Volume
Managed execution services charge a premium for the infrastructure management they provide. At high agent execution volumes, the unit economics often favor self-hosting. Run the numbers at 10,000 agent runs per day before committing to a managed service for production.
When You Need Custom Execution Patterns
Managed services provide standard execution patterns. If your workflow requires custom branching logic, specialized retry strategies, or integration with internal systems that can't be exposed to a hosted environment, self-built orchestration is the only option.
A Practical Heuristic
Start with managed services. Evaluate migration to self-hosted after six months, once you understand your actual execution patterns, volume, and cost. Most teams that start with managed services find they're still appropriate at production scale. Some don't. But you'll know what to optimize for.
The Most Common Mistake
Building orchestration infrastructure before validating the agent use case. Teams spend months engineering reliable execution for an agent that turns out not to be useful. Use managed services to validate the use case, then invest in infrastructure for the patterns that prove out.