# 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. 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: 2026-10-04

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.

- Honcho: grade B, 64.2/100, rank #188 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/honcho.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/honcho.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 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 | Honcho | 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) | 79 | 89 | Zep +10 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 65 | 70 | Zep +5 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 48 | 84 | Zep +36 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 80 | 30 | Honcho +50 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 73 | 80 | Zep +7 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 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

1. Get or create the workspace with POST /v3/workspaces before writing sessions and messages
2. Batch up to 100 messages per request, each under 25,000 characters
3. Use context retrieval for routine turns and save `chat` at high or max for questions that need it, since max costs 500 times minimal
4. Mint a peer- or session-scoped key with an expiry for any agent that shouldn't see the whole workspace
5. Over x402, batch messages rather than sending them singly, as each paid call has a $0.001 floor

### 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

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