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

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- Site index for agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt (full text: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms-full.txt)
- API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json
- Updated: 2026-10-05

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.

- 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
- Zep: grade B, 69.6/100, rank #112 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/zep.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/zep.json

## 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 | Cognee | Zep | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 50 | 65 | Zep +15 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 85 | 89 | Zep +4 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 59 | 70 | Zep +11 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 39 | 84 | Zep +45 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 35 | 30 | Cognee +5 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 82 | 80 | Cognee +2 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 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

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

### Zep

1. Create the user and a thread before adding messages, as the quickstart does
2. Set `return_context` when adding messages to skip a second round trip
3. Keep episodes short. Every 350 bytes past the first costs another credit
4. Read Retry-After on a 429 and back off with jitter. Free accounts over quota drop to 5 requests a minute
5. Expect a delay after a graph add (202 Accepted) before new facts show up in search

## Other comparisons with Cognee or Zep

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