head to head · open source
cognee vs vearch
cognee has 30,848 GitHub stars, 3,066 forks, 495 open issues and last shipped yesterday. vearch has 2,327 stars, 365 forks, 170 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. cognee leads on adoption by 1,226% (30,848 vs 2,327 stars). cognee is written in Python under Apache-2.0; vearch is written in Python under Apache-2.0. cognee has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, vearch 16%. 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 | vearch | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 31K | ★ 2.3K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-19 | 2026-07-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.1K | ⑂ 365 |
| 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 vearch if
- You want the vearch 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 vearch 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 vearch
Vearch is an Apache 2.0 cloud native distributed vector database that provides similarity search over embedding vectors for AI native applications, built for teams that need retrieval, RAG, or visual search at a scale where an in process library is no longer enough.
read the full vearch overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is cognee or vearch more popular?
cognee has 30,848 GitHub stars and vearch has 2,327. cognee has the larger community by that measure.
Are cognee and vearch free?
Both are open source. cognee is licensed under Apache-2.0 and vearch under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between cognee and vearch?
cognee is written in Python and vearch 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 vearch?
Choose cognee if you want the larger community (30,848 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose vearch if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.