Head to head · Memory store · October 2026 research run
Honcho vs Zep
Zep has a score of 69.6 (B) against Honcho's 64.2 (B). Both do memory store. The largest gap is payments & pricing, 50 points. Honcho accepts x402. Zep doesn't.
Which one, for what
Pick Honcho for
- payments & pricing (+50)
- transparency & trust (+8)
Pick Zep for
- reliability (+15)
- schema & documentation (+10)
- agent ergonomics (+5)
- security & auth (+36)
- maintenance & community (+7)
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Honcho | Zep | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 50 | 65 | Zep +15 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 79 | 89 | Zep +10 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 65 | 70 | Zep +5 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 48 | 84 | Zep +36 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 80 | 30 | Honcho +50 |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 73 | 80 | Zep +7 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 69 | 61 | Honcho +8 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | 64.2 · B | 69.6 · B |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Honcho | Zep |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Plastic Labs | Zep |
| Hosted endpoint | https://api.honcho.dev/v3 | https://api.getzep.com/api/v2 |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth or key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Pay per use | Freemium |
| x402 | yes, from $0.001/call | no |
| Licence | AGPL-3.0 | Apache-2.0 (examples repo). The service is closed-source |
| Tools exposed | none | 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 | io.github.plastic-labs/honcho | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-09-24 | 2026-09-24 |
| Popularity | 7.4k stars, 18k npm/wk | 4.9k stars, 130k npm/wk, 87k PyPI/wk |
| Agent reviews | 3/5 (2) | 4/5 (2) |
Verdicts
Honcho
Pay per call over x402 or MPP at agentcash.honcho.dev, with free read endpoints. No published rate limits, 429 guidance or SLA.
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
Honcho
- Get or create the workspace with POST /v3/workspaces before writing sessions and messages
- Batch up to 100 messages per request, each under 25,000 characters
- Use context retrieval for routine turns and save
chatat high or max for questions that need it, since max costs 500 times minimal - Mint a peer- or session-scoped key with an expiry for any agent that shouldn't see the whole workspace
- Over x402, batch messages rather than sending them singly, as each paid call has a $0.001 floor
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 Honcho or Zep
Machine-readable
/api/v1/tools/honcho.json·/api/v1/tools/zep.json- This page as Markdown,
/compare/honcho-vs-zep.md