Stacks / 8 workflow stages
Build a Production Research Agent
From web discovery to extraction, orchestration, browser actions, tracing, evaluation, and security.
Best for
Teams building an agent that has to find information, inspect sources, take actions, and produce evidence-backed output reliably.
Outcome
A research agent that can discover sources, retrieve usable content, navigate the web when APIs are not enough, and be traced and tested before production.
Not for
A simple one-shot search or chat experience that does not need tools, state, browser actions, or production monitoring.
Use this as a decision framework, not a mandatory shopping list. Swap or skip layers based on your existing stack, constraints, and risk profile.
1. Discover
Exa
Use a search layer designed for programmatic and semantic discovery so the agent can find relevant sources instead of relying on a fixed corpus.
AlternativesTavily, Brave Search API
2. Retrieve
Firecrawl
Turn web pages into cleaner machine-usable content for downstream reasoning and extraction.
AlternativesJina AI Reader, Apify
3. Structure
Pydantic AI
Give the agent typed tools and structured outputs so important steps are less dependent on free-form model text.
AlternativesClaude Agent SDK
4. Orchestrate
LangGraph
Add explicit state and multi-step control when the workflow needs branching, retries, checkpoints, or durable execution.
AlternativesLlamaIndex, Dify
5. Act in the browser
Browserbase
Use managed browser infrastructure when the agent has to interact with real web interfaces rather than only fetch pages.
AlternativesBrowser Use, Stagehand, Playwright
6. Trace
Langfuse
Capture prompts, tool calls, traces, latency, and failures so you can see what the agent actually did.
AlternativesLangSmith, Arize Phoenix
7. Evaluate
Promptfoo
Create repeatable tests for prompts, tool behavior, and regressions before changes reach users.
AlternativesBraintrust, DeepEval
8. Harden
OWASP GenAI Security Project
Review common GenAI and agent attack surfaces before exposing tools, data, or browser actions in production.
AlternativesMITRE ATLAS, NVIDIA garak
Need this workflow built and running, not just linked? EE Solutions implements agentic stacks like this one. EE Solutions is a senior technology team for private capital firms and their portfolio companies.
Talk to EE Solutions ↗