head to head · open source
Langfuse vs cognee
Langfuse has 34,729 GitHub stars, 3,785 forks, 926 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cognee has 30,780 stars, 3,050 forks, 495 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Langfuse leads on adoption by 13% (34,729 vs 30,780 stars). Langfuse is written in TypeScript under a custom or non-standard licence; cognee is written in Python under Apache-2.0. Langfuse has attracted 11% as many forks as stars, cognee 10%. Langfuse 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
| Langfuse | cognee | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 35K | ★ 31K |
| License | Custom / other | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | TypeScript | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 3.8K | ⑂ 3.0K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Langfuse if
- You weight community size — 35K stars and counting
- You want the Custom / other license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick cognee if
- You want the cognee 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 cognee fits your workflow better
About Langfuse
Langfuse is an open source LLM engineering platform for building, monitoring, and improving AI powered applications. It lives in the LLMops ecosystem and provides tooling for the full development lifecycle—from prompt iteration and evaluation to observability and dataset management. Built with TypeScript and powered by ClickHouse, it enables teams to track LLM calls, user sessions, and internal logic like retrieval or agent actions in a unified interface.
read the full Langfuse overview →
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 →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Langfuse or cognee more popular?
Langfuse has 34,729 GitHub stars and cognee has 30,780. Langfuse has the larger community by that measure.
Are Langfuse and cognee free?
Both are open source. Langfuse has no licence declared in this registry, and cognee is licensed under Apache-2.0. Both are free to self-host.
What is the difference between Langfuse and cognee?
Langfuse is written in TypeScript and cognee 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, Langfuse or cognee?
Choose Langfuse if you want the larger community (34,729 stars) or its Custom / other licence terms. Choose cognee if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.