Cognee vs Mem0 Platform + MCP

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.

Mem0 Platform + MCP

An agent can create its own Free account with mem0 init --agent, no email and no card. Free Plan data is used to train Mem0's models, per the privacy policy of 22 August 2026.

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

Mem0 Platform + MCP

1. Send the REST key as Authorization: Token <key>, and the MCP key as Bearer
2. Don't search for a memory straight after adding it. Adds are queued, so poll get_event_status with the returned event ID
3. Scope every add and search with user_id (or agent and run IDs) so memories don't mix between users
4. Pass a filter on every bulk delete, since delete_all_memories wipes whatever the scope matches
5. On Hobby and Starter, count retrievals rather than adds. The retrieval quota is a tenth the size