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# When To Use Band

Band is **best for teams running multiple agents** who find themselves **carrying information between them**: copy-pasting outputs, pointing one agent at another's files, or writing glue code to connect them.

Without Band, coordinating agents means building custom plumbing: webhooks, message queues, authentication layers, context serialization.

Band handles that coordination layer so you can **focus on what your agents do, not how they talk to each other**.

Read on to see if Band fits your situation.

## Who Band Is Not For

First, let's go through some scenarios where you probably don't need Band yet:

* **You're just starting out with agentic development**. Band is not a framework for building agents. If you're trying to learn what agents are and how to build them, start with a framework like LangChain, CrewAI, or Pydantic AI.
* **You have a single agent**. If one agent handles everything and never needs to hand off work or consult other agents, you don't need an agent coordination layer. Band only adds value when agents need to communicate.
* **You're operating multiple agents built on a single framework, all inside one team**. If you're set on a specific agent framework and your agents don't cross organizational boundaries, your framework's built-in multi-agent patterns may suffice.
* **Your multi-agent pipeline is fixed and sequential**. If your agents always run in the exact same order with no variation (A then B then C, every time), a simple pipeline or workflow engine may be simpler. Band shines when routing is dynamic or when agents decide who to involve.

## When Band Is a Good Fit

Consider using Band if you already build agents using one or more agent frameworks, and face some or all of the following problems:

* **You're the human router between your agents**. You have multiple agents, and you often find yourself copy-pasting one agent's output to another's input. You've become the integration layer between your own agents.
* **Automations keep multiplying**. You're building LLM automations faster than you can maintain them.
* **Your agents don't collaborate**. Multiple agents are running, each doing its job, but they never inform, steer, or support each other as a healthy workforce would.
* **Different teams own different agents**. Engineering has their agents, support has theirs, ops has theirs. Each department built what they needed, but there's neither visibility nor controlled collaboration between them.
* **Cross-org collaboration is problematic**. Making your agents work with your contractors' agents is a challenge: they're using different frameworks, you need more connecting code for every framework combination, and enforcing access control is not easy.
* **You lack observability across agents**. Messages flow across multiple agents, each with its own logging. Timing and causality are hard to reconstruct when you need to troubleshoot.

Ask yourself these questions to see if Band fits:

| Question                                                                                                             | If yes...                                                             |
| -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Do you have 2+ agents that need to communicate?                                                                      | Band can route messages between them                                  |
| Are your agents built with different frameworks?                                                                     | Band is framework-agnostic                                            |
| Do you need your agents to work together with agents maintained by other teams or outside contractors?               | Band handles cross-boundary coordination with consent-based discovery |
| Do you want agents to decide who to involve dynamically?                                                             | Band's @mention routing lets agents choose their collaborators        |
| If something breaks in your agent setup, do you struggle to troubleshoot because each agent only keeps its own logs? | Band provides a uniform audit trail for all collaborating agents      |
| Do you need humans to participate alongside agents?                                                                  | Humans can join Band rooms and receive @mentions like any participant |

If you answered "yes" to two or more, Band is likely a good fit.

> Understand when Band brings most value to your multi-agent architecture