head to head · open source
cognee vs rag_api
cognee has 30,848 GitHub stars, 3,066 forks, 495 open issues and last shipped yesterday. rag_api has 901 stars, 404 forks, 45 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. cognee leads on adoption by 3,324% (30,848 vs 901 stars). cognee is written in Python under Apache-2.0; rag_api is written in Python under MIT. cognee has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, rag_api 45%. 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 | rag_api | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 31K | ★ 901 |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-08-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 404 |
| 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 rag_api if
- You want the rag_api feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and rag_api 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 rag_api
rag api is an MIT licensed Python FastAPI service that indexes documents into embeddings by file id and serves ID based retrieval augmented generation over Langchain and PostgreSQL/pgvector, built primarily for LibreChat deployments but usable by any application that stores embeddings at the file level.
read the full rag_api overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is cognee or rag_api more popular?
cognee has 30,848 GitHub stars and rag_api has 901. cognee has the larger community by that measure.
Are cognee and rag_api free?
Both are open source. cognee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and rag_api under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cognee and rag_api?
cognee is written in Python and rag_api 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 rag_api?
Choose cognee if you want the larger community (30,848 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose rag_api if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.