head to head · open source
vllm vs cognee
vllm has 92,028 GitHub stars, 22,335 forks, 7,953 open issues and last shipped yesterday. cognee has 30,780 stars, 3,050 forks, 495 open issues and last shipped yesterday. vllm leads on adoption by 199% (92,028 vs 30,780 stars). vllm is written in Python under Apache-2.0; cognee is written in Python under Apache-2.0. vllm has attracted 24% as many forks as stars, cognee 10%. vllm 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
| vllm | cognee | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 92K | ★ 31K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Python | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 22K | ⑂ 3.0K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick vllm if
- You weight community size — 92K 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 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 vllm
vLLM is a high throughput, memory efficient Python library for LLM inference and serving, built for ML engineers and platform teams who need to run open weight models on their own hardware at production scale.
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 vllm or cognee more popular?
vllm has 92,028 GitHub stars and cognee has 30,780. vllm has the larger community by that measure.
Are vllm and cognee free?
Both are open source. vllm is licensed under Apache-2.0 and cognee under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between vllm and cognee?
vllm is written in Python 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, vllm or cognee?
Choose vllm if you want the larger community (92,028 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose cognee if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.