Cognee vs Zep

Pick two tools from the same category to compare side-by-side.

	Cognee Open-source memory platform that gives AI agents persistent long-term memory via combined knowledge graphs and vector embeddings.	Zep Temporal knowledge graph memory for agents (Graphiti under the hood).
Category	memory	memory
Vendor type	hybrid	hybrid
Pricing	freemium	freemium
Strengths	+ Combines graph and vector storage for relationship-aware retrieval beyond similarity search + Provenance tracking on ingested context from files, APIs, and databases + First-party integrations with agent tooling (Claude Code, LangGraph, MCP server) + Pluggable backends for graph, vector, and relational storage	+ Temporal knowledge-graph model + Strong for time-sensitive domains + Managed and self-hostable
Tradeoffs	− LLM-driven graph construction adds cost and latency to the ingestion pipeline − Younger project with a fast-moving API surface compared to mature retrieval stores − Graph-plus-vector architecture introduces more moving parts than a plain vector memory	− Graph model is more complex to reason about
Used in stacks	0	6