---
id: openai-chatkit
version: "1.6.5"
license: unclear
license_treatment: unclear
maintenance: active
---

# openai-chatkit — A ChatKit backend SDK.

License: unclear · Maintenance: active · Downloads: 674.4K/mo

## What it is and what it does

openai-chatkit is a backend SDK that wraps OpenAI's chat and agent APIs into a structured Python interface for building conversational applications. It sits between your application code and OpenAI's API, providing a ChatKit class that integrates with the openai and openai-agents packages to handle authentication, request formatting, and response handling. The package is designed for developers building chat-based services who want a higher-level abstraction than raw API calls.

The SDK depends on pydantic for data validation, uvicorn for async HTTP serving, and jinja2 for template rendering, suggesting it supports both synchronous and asynchronous patterns and may include built-in web server capabilities. With low install friction (a pure wheel), recent maintenance activity, and no known security vulnerabilities, it presents a straightforward integration path for projects already using OpenAI's services. However, the unclear license treatment and sparse documentation in the fact sheet mean you should verify the actual LICENSE file and examples before committing to production use.

Use it for:

- Build a REST API backend for a chat application that routes requests through OpenAI's chat completion models.
- Integrate OpenAI agents into a larger application framework using the structured SDK interface.
- Prototype conversational AI features with templated prompts (via jinja2) and validated request/response schemas (via pydantic).
- Deploy a multi-user chat service using uvicorn's async server capabilities with OpenAI as the inference backend.

## Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts above — verify before relying.

A backend SDK for building chat applications using OpenAI's APIs, providing structured integration with OpenAI's chat and agent models through a Python interface.

Yes, if you are building a chat application on top of OpenAI's APIs and want a structured backend SDK. The package has low install friction, active maintenance, no known vulnerabilities, and integrates well with standard Python async tooling. However, verify the Apache 2.0 license claim against the actual LICENSE file, and check the documentation (not linked in the fact sheet) to confirm the SDK's API surface matches your needs before production deployment.

## Install

pip install openai-chatkit
uv add openai-chatkit
poetry add openai-chatkit

## Installing openai-chatkit

Before you install: Low install friction with a pure-Python wheel distribution. Active maintenance status with a recent release cycle (87 days since last release). Depends on established packages: pydantic for validation, uvicorn for async serving, openai and openai-agents for API access, and jinja2 for templating.

License in practice: Licensed under Apache License 2.0 according to the project description, though the fact sheet marks license treatment as unclear—verify the actual license file before relying on it for commercial or derivative-work decisions.

Quickstart:

pip install openai-chatkit

from openai_chatkit import ChatKit
from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI()
chatkit = ChatKit(client=client)

Requires Python 3.10 or later. Requires a valid OpenAI API key to instantiate the client.

Verify before relying:

- What specific ChatKit features or methods are available beyond basic client wrapping—the fact sheet does not detail the SDK's API surface.
- Whether openai-agents is a separate package or an internal OpenAI dependency—clarify to understand the full dependency tree.
- Documentation and example usage—project URLs (docs, homepage, repo) are not populated in the fact sheet.

## Package facts

- License: not declared (unclear)
- Python support: supports_current
- Install friction: low
- Maintenance: active
- Downloads: 674.4K/month (top 15,000 on PyPI)
- Known vulnerabilities: none known

## Tags

openai chat backend sdk, chatgpt application framework, openai agents integration, conversational ai backend, openai api wrapper, chat application toolkit, llm backend framework, openai-integration, async-framework, chat-backend

[View on SkillFed](https://skillfed.io/packages/openai-chatkit) · [View on PyPI](https://pypi.org/project/openai-chatkit/)