claude-mem vs Cognee

claude-mem

Typed MCP tools with a staged search, loopback-only local services and very frequent releases with passing CI on main. Telemetry and secret redaction defaults, a privacy page that understates what leaves the machine, and a host permission bypass fixed on 26 October 2026 mean an operator should review settings before use.

Cognee

Apache-2.0 library, REST server and MCP server, all self-hostable, with local models and no LLM key since 1.6.0. No status page, rate limits, SLA or SOC 2 for Cloud, and Cloud runs in AWS us-east-1 with no EU region.

claude-mem

1. Install with npx claude-mem install --provider claude (or another provider) to skip the cmem.ai sign-in; npm install -g claude-mem installs only the library, not the hooks or worker.
2. Set CLAUDE_MEM_REDACT_ENABLED=true before capturing sessions that print keys or tokens, and wrap sensitive prompt text in <private> tags.
3. Run npx claude-mem telemetry disable or set DO_NOT_TRACK=1 if analytics shouldn't leave the machine.
4. Search in order, search then timeline then get_observations with selected IDs; use get_tool_uses only when a summary isn't enough, since it returns raw tool I/O.
5. Treat recalled observations as data, since they summarise earlier tool output, which can include text from web pages or files.

Cognee

1. Use remember, recall and forget. The older cognify, search and delete MCP tools are gone
2. Always include /api/v1 in REST paths
3. Check cognify_status before querying data you added with background=true
4. Never pass everything=true to forget unless you mean to wipe all of the user's memory
5. Set a client timeout on Cloud calls and treat HTTP 402 as an empty balance, since an empty balance has also shown up as hangs