head to head · open source
cognee vs dstack
cognee has 30,780 GitHub stars, 3,050 forks, 495 open issues and last shipped yesterday. dstack has 2,252 stars, 262 forks, 68 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cognee leads on adoption by 1,267% (30,780 vs 2,252 stars). cognee is written in Python under Apache-2.0; dstack is written in Python under MPL-2.0. cognee has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, dstack 12%. cognee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (agent-skills), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
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 | dstack | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 31K | ★ 2.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.0K | ⑂ 262 |
| 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 dstack if
- You want the dstack feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and dstack 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 dstack
dstack is an open source Python project in the AI and machine learning infrastructure ecosystem. It is a unified control plane for GPU provisioning and orchestration that works with GPU clouds, Kubernetes, and on prem clusters. The project supports NVIDIA, AMD, Google TPU, and Tenstorrent accelerators, and it is compatible with open source tools and frameworks.
read the full dstack overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is cognee or dstack more popular?
cognee has 30,780 GitHub stars and dstack has 2,252. cognee has the larger community by that measure.
Are cognee and dstack free?
Both are open source. cognee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and dstack under MPL-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cognee and dstack?
cognee is written in Python and dstack 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 dstack?
Choose cognee if you want the larger community (30,780 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose dstack if its feature set, stack or MPL-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.