Cognee vs Memory (MCP reference server)

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.

Memory (MCP reference server)

Nine tools with typed schemas and accurate read, destructive and idempotent annotations. No pagination or limits. read_graph returns everything and search_nodes every match.

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

Memory (MCP reference server)

1. Set MEMORY_FILE_PATH to an absolute path. The default sits inside the npx cache
2. Use search_nodes or open_nodes instead of read_graph once the graph has more than a few hundred entities
3. Make memory writes one at a time. Parallel calls in one turn can overwrite each other in 2026.8.31
4. Create both entities before create_relations. A missing endpoint fails the whole batch
5. Keep observations short and factual. They come back verbatim in every later read