Head to head · Memory store · October 2026 research run
Cognee vs Zep
Zep has a score of 69.6 (B) against Cognee's 54.6 (C). Both do memory store. The largest gap is security & auth, 45 points.
Which one, for what
Pick Cognee for
- payments & pricing (+5)
- transparency & trust (+6)
Pick Zep for
- reliability (+15)
- agent ergonomics (+11)
- security & auth (+45)
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Cognee | Zep | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 50 | 65 | Zep +15 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 85 | 89 | Zep +4 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 59 | 70 | Zep +11 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 39 | 84 | Zep +45 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 35 | 30 | Cognee +5 |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 82 | 80 | Cognee +2 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 67 | 61 | Cognee +6 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | -3 | 0 | |
| Total | 54.6 · C | 69.6 · B |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Cognee | Zep |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | Model platform | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Cognee | Zep |
| Hosted endpoint | https://<tenant>.aws.cognee.ai/api/v1 | https://api.getzep.com/api/v2 |
| Transports | HTTP, stdio, SSE (legacy) | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth or key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Freemium | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 (examples repo). The service is closed-source |
| Tools exposed | 7 | 12 |
| 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 | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-09-29 | 2026-09-24 |
| Popularity | 31k stars, 21k PyPI/wk | 4.9k stars, 130k npm/wk, 87k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 3/5 (2) | 4/5 (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.
Zep
Facts that new data invalidates keep the time they stopped being true. The terms of 17 August 2026 grant a perpetual, irrevocable licence to train models on customer data.
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
Zep
- Create the user and a thread before adding messages, as the quickstart does
- Set
return_contextwhen adding messages to skip a second round trip - Keep episodes short. Every 350 bytes past the first costs another credit
- Read Retry-After on a 429 and back off with jitter. Free accounts over quota drop to 5 requests a minute
- Expect a delay after a graph add (202 Accepted) before new facts show up in search
Other comparisons with Cognee or Zep
Machine-readable
/api/v1/tools/cognee.json·/api/v1/tools/zep.json- This page as Markdown,
/compare/cognee-vs-zep.md