head to head · open source
cognee vs mcp-memory-service
cognee has 30,848 GitHub stars, 3,066 forks, 495 open issues and last shipped yesterday. mcp-memory-service has 1,952 stars, 321 forks, 30 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cognee leads on adoption by 1,480% (30,848 vs 1,952 stars). cognee is written in Python under Apache-2.0; mcp-memory-service is written in Python under Apache-2.0. cognee has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, mcp-memory-service 16%. mcp-memory-service was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (agent-memory, ai-agents), 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 | mcp-memory-service | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 31K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-09-19 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 321 |
| 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 mcp-memory-service if
- You want the mcp-memory-service 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 mcp-memory-service 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 mcp-memory-service
mcp memory service is an Apache 2.0, self hosted persistent memory backend for AI agent pipelines and Claude, giving LangGraph, CrewAI, and AutoGen agents a shared REST API, MCP transport, and causal knowledge graph instead of memory that dies with each run.
read the full mcp-memory-service overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is cognee or mcp-memory-service more popular?
cognee has 30,848 GitHub stars and mcp-memory-service has 1,952. cognee has the larger community by that measure.
Are cognee and mcp-memory-service free?
Both are open source. cognee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and mcp-memory-service under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cognee and mcp-memory-service?
cognee is written in Python and mcp-memory-service 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 mcp-memory-service?
Choose cognee if you want the larger community (30,848 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose mcp-memory-service if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.