# 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. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

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- Updated: 2026-10-05

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.

- Cognee: grade C, 54.6/100, rank #320 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/cognee.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/cognee.json
- Honcho: grade B, 64.2/100, rank #188 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/honcho.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/honcho.json

## 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 | Cognee | Honcho | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 50 | 50 | even |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 85 | 79 | Cognee +6 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 59 | 65 | Honcho +6 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 39 | 48 | Honcho +9 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 35 | 80 | Honcho +45 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 82 | 73 | Cognee +9 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 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

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

### Honcho

1. Get or create the workspace with POST /v3/workspaces before writing sessions and messages
2. Batch up to 100 messages per request, each under 25,000 characters
3. Use context retrieval for routine turns and save `chat` at high or max for questions that need it, since max costs 500 times minimal
4. Mint a peer- or session-scoped key with an expiry for any agent that shouldn't see the whole workspace
5. Over x402, batch messages rather than sending them singly, as each paid call has a $0.001 floor

## Other comparisons with Cognee or Honcho

- [Cognee vs Graphiti](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cognee-vs-graphiti.md)
- [Cognee vs Hindsight](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cognee-vs-hindsight.md)
- [Cognee vs LocalGhost](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cognee-vs-localghost.md)
- [Cognee vs Mem0 Platform + MCP](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cognee-vs-mem0.md)
- [Cognee vs Supermemory API + MCP](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cognee-vs-supermemory.md)
- [Cognee vs Zep](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/cognee-vs-zep.md)
- [Graphiti vs Honcho](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/graphiti-vs-honcho.md)
- [Hindsight vs Honcho](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/hindsight-vs-honcho.md)
- [Honcho vs LocalGhost](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/honcho-vs-localghost.md)
- [Honcho vs Mem0 Platform + MCP](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/honcho-vs-mem0.md)
- [Honcho vs Supermemory API + MCP](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/honcho-vs-supermemory.md)
- [Honcho vs Zep](https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/honcho-vs-zep.md)