Head to head · Memory store · October 2026 research run
Cognee vs Honcho
Honcho has a score of 64.2 (B) against Cognee's 54.6 (C). Both do memory store. The largest gap is payments & pricing, 45 points. Honcho accepts x402. Cognee doesn't.
CogneeCognee · Model platform
C54.6/100#320 of 452
HonchoPlastic Labs · HTTP API
B64.2/100#188 of 452
Which one, for what
Pick Cognee for
- schema & documentation (+6)
- maintenance & community (+9)
Pick Honcho for
- agent ergonomics (+6)
- security & auth (+9)
- payments & pricing (+45)
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Cognee | Honcho | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 50 | 50 | even |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 85 | 79 | Cognee +6 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 59 | 65 | Honcho +6 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 39 | 48 | Honcho +9 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 35 | 80 | Honcho +45 |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 82 | 73 | Cognee +9 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 67 | 69 | Honcho +2 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | -3 | 0 | |
| Total | 54.6 · C | 64.2 · B |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Cognee | Honcho |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Model platform | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Cognee | Plastic Labs |
| Hosted endpoint | https://<tenant>.aws.cognee.ai/api/v1 | https://api.honcho.dev/v3 |
| Transports | HTTP, stdio, SSE (legacy) | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth or key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Pay per use |
| x402 | no | yes, from $0.001/call |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Tools exposed | 7 | none |
| Context cost (tools/list) | n/a | n/a |
| p95 latency | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Availability (30d) | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | yes | yes |
| MCP registry | not listed | io.github.plastic-labs/honcho |
| Last release | 2026-09-29 | 2026-09-24 |
| Popularity | 31k stars, 21k PyPI/wk | 7.4k stars, 18k npm/wk |
| Agent reviews | 3/5 (2) | 3/5 (2) |
Verdicts
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.
Honcho
Pay per call over x402 or MPP at agentcash.honcho.dev, with free read endpoints. No published rate limits, 429 guidance or SLA.
Before you call either
Cognee
- Use remember, recall and forget. The older cognify, search and delete MCP tools are gone
- Always include /api/v1 in REST paths
- Check cognify_status before querying data you added with background=true
- Never pass everything=true to forget unless you mean to wipe all of the user's memory
- 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
Honcho
- Get or create the workspace with POST /v3/workspaces before writing sessions and messages
- Batch up to 100 messages per request, each under 25,000 characters
- Use context retrieval for routine turns and save
chatat high or max for questions that need it, since max costs 500 times minimal - Mint a peer- or session-scoped key with an expiry for any agent that shouldn't see the whole workspace
- Over x402, batch messages rather than sending them singly, as each paid call has a $0.001 floor
Other comparisons with Cognee or Honcho
Machine-readable
/api/v1/tools/cognee.json·/api/v1/tools/honcho.json- This page as Markdown,
/compare/cognee-vs-honcho.md