head to head · open source
cognee vs dagster
cognee has 30,780 GitHub stars, 3,050 forks, 495 open issues and last shipped yesterday. dagster has 16,169 stars, 2,294 forks, 2,589 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cognee leads on adoption by 90% (30,780 vs 16,169 stars). cognee is written in Python under Apache-2.0; dagster is written in Python under Apache-2.0. cognee has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, dagster 14%. cognee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| cognee | dagster | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 31K | ★ 16K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.0K | ⑂ 2.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick cognee if
- You weight community size — 31K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick dagster if
- You want the dagster feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and dagster fits your workflow better
About cognee
Cognee is an open source AI memory platform for agents, released under the Apache 2.0 license and written in Python. It ingests data in any format and builds a self hosted knowledge graph that agents query to recall, connect, and act with full context across sessions. The project lives in the Python ecosystem, installs through standard package managers, and sits in the AI and machine learning infrastructure category alongside graph databases and context engineering tooling. A companion research paper, "Optimizing the Interface Between Knowledge Graphs and LLMs for Complex Reasoning" by Markovic et al., 2025, docu…
read the full cognee overview →
About dagster
Dagster is a cloud native data pipeline orchestrator written in Python and released under the Apache 2.0 licence, built for data engineers, data scientists, and machine learning teams who declare the tables, data sets, models, and reports their pipelines should produce and need those assets tested, observable, and kept up to date from local development through production.
read the full dagster overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is cognee or dagster more popular?
cognee has 30,780 GitHub stars and dagster has 16,169. cognee has the larger community by that measure.
Are cognee and dagster free?
Both are open source. cognee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and dagster under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cognee and dagster?
cognee is written in Python and dagster in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, cognee or dagster?
Choose cognee if you want the larger community (30,780 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose dagster if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.