head to head · open source
Ollama vs cognee
Ollama has 181,161 GitHub stars, 17,917 forks, 3,957 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cognee has 30,780 stars, 3,050 forks, 495 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Ollama leads on adoption by 489% (181,161 vs 30,780 stars). Ollama is written in Go under MIT; cognee is written in Python under Apache-2.0. Ollama has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, cognee 10%. 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
| Ollama | cognee | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 181K | ★ 31K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 18K | ⑂ 3.0K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Ollama if
- You weight community size — 181K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- 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 Ollama
Ollama is a Go based, MIT licensed runtime that downloads and runs open source large language models such as DeepSeek, Qwen, Gemma, GLM, MiniMax and gpt oss locally on a user's own machine, and it is aimed at developers and teams that want model inference without routing prompts through a hosted API.
read the full Ollama 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 Ollama or cognee more popular?
Ollama has 181,161 GitHub stars and cognee has 30,780. Ollama has the larger community by that measure.
Are Ollama and cognee free?
Both are open source. Ollama is licensed under MIT and cognee under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Ollama and cognee?
Ollama is written in Go 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, Ollama or cognee?
Choose Ollama if you want the larger community (181,161 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose cognee if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.