head to head · open source
cognee vs txtai
cognee has 30,780 GitHub stars, 3,050 forks, 495 open issues and last shipped yesterday. txtai has 12,956 stars, 891 forks, 9 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. cognee leads on adoption by 138% (30,780 vs 12,956 stars). cognee is written in Python under Apache-2.0; txtai is written in Python under Apache-2.0. cognee has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, txtai 7%. cognee was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (ai, 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 | txtai | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 31K | ★ 13K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-15 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.0K | ⑂ 891 |
| 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 txtai if
- You want the txtai 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 txtai 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 txtai
txtai is an all in one AI framework for semantic search, LLM orchestration and language model workflows, written in Python and released under the Apache 2.0 license. It lives in the Python machine learning ecosystem and is built on Hugging Face Transformers, Sentence Transformers and FastAPI. The core component is an embeddings database, which is a union of vector indexes (both sparse and dense), graph networks and relational databases. That foundation enables vector search and also serves as a knowledge source for large language model applications.
read the full txtai overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is cognee or txtai more popular?
cognee has 30,780 GitHub stars and txtai has 12,956. cognee has the larger community by that measure.
Are cognee and txtai free?
Both are open source. cognee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and txtai under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cognee and txtai?
cognee is written in Python and txtai 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 txtai?
Choose cognee if you want the larger community (30,780 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose txtai if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.