head to head · open source
cognee vs dstack
cognee has 33,012 GitHub stars, 3,448 forks, 495 open issues and last shipped yesterday. dstack has 2,299 stars, 272 forks, 68 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cognee leads on adoption by 1,336% (33,012 vs 2,299 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 | ★ 33K | ★ 2.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MPL-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.4K | ⑂ 272 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick cognee if
- You weight community size — 33K 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 The Open Source AI Memory Platform for Agents Demo . Docs . Learn More · Join Discord · Join r/AIMemory . Community Plugins & Add ons Cognee is the open source AI memory platform that gives AI agents persistent long term memory across sessions. Ingest data in any format, build a self hosted knowledge graph, and let every agent recall, connect, and act with full context 🌐 This README is also available in: Deutsch Español Français 日本語 한국어 Português Русский 中文 📄 Read the research paper: Optimizing the Interface Between Knowledge Graphs and LLMs for Complex Reasoning — Markovic et al., 2025 When to use…
read the full cognee overview →
About dstack
dstack is a unified control plane for GPU provisioning and orchestration that works with any GPU cloud, Kubernetes, or on prem clusters. It streamlines development, training, and inference, and is compatible with any hardware, open source tools, and frameworks. Accelerators dstack supports NVIDIA , AMD , Google TPU , and Tenstorrent accelerators out of the box. Latest news ✨ [2026/08] dstack 0.21.0: Pydantic v2, Gateway replicas [2026/07] dstack 0.20.29: Presets — agent driven inference optimization (experimental) [2026/07] dstack 0.20.27: Slurm backend [2026/05] dstack 0.20.21: Kubernetes multiple clusters…
read the full dstack overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is cognee or dstack more popular?
cognee has 33,012 GitHub stars and dstack has 2,299. 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 (33,012 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.