head to head · open source
cognee vs lancedb
cognee has 30,848 GitHub stars, 3,066 forks, 495 open issues and last shipped yesterday. lancedb has 11,473 stars, 1,060 forks, 627 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cognee leads on adoption by 169% (30,848 vs 11,473 stars). cognee is written in Python under Apache-2.0; lancedb is written in Rust under Apache-2.0. cognee has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, lancedb 9%. lancedb 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.
← all 20902 open source comparisons
Side by side
| cognee | lancedb | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 31K | ★ 11K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Rust |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 1.1K |
| 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 lancedb if
- You want the lancedb feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You evaluated both and lancedb 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 lancedb
LanceDB is an open source, developer friendly embedded retrieval library for multimodal AI, maintained in Rust and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It describes itself as a multimodal AI lakehouse: a single place where developers can build, train and analyze AI workloads over vectors, metadata and multimodal data such as text, images, videos and point clouds. It is built on top of the Lance columnar format, which provides the storage layer for efficient storage and analytics.
read the full lancedb overview →
More in AI & Machine Learning
Related comparisons
More Machine Learning Infrastructure projects
Compare either of these against the rest of the Machine Learning Infrastructure field.
Frequently asked questions
Is cognee or lancedb more popular?
cognee has 30,848 GitHub stars and lancedb has 11,473. cognee has the larger community by that measure.
Are cognee and lancedb free?
Both are open source. cognee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and lancedb under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cognee and lancedb?
cognee is written in Python and lancedb in Rust. 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 lancedb?
Choose cognee if you want the larger community (30,848 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose lancedb if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.