Agentic Index
Cognee vs Zep (2026)
Cognee and Zep both bet that agent memory should be a graph, packaged differently: Cognee is open source first, free to self host, with a free cloud tier of a million tokens and Cloud Pro at two dollars fifty per million tokens, while Zep pairs its open source Graphiti engine with a hosted service from a free thousand credits a month through Flex at 125 dollars (104 annual) and Flex Plus at 375 dollars, graph included at every tier.
Cognee's pure token pricing suits ingestion heavy workloads; Zep's credit tiers with a production hosted service suit teams that want a managed temporal knowledge graph now.
Choose Cognee if
- Token metered pricing maps directly to your document ingestion volumes.
- Self hosting the full open source engine is your architecture.
- Bring your own key enterprise options fit your governance.
Choose Zep if
- A managed temporal knowledge graph in production is the immediate goal.
- Credit tiers from free to Flex match your growth path.
- The Graphiti open source core keeps an exit path open.
| At a glance | Cognee | Zep |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Agent infrastructure | Agent infrastructure |
| Entry price | Open source self host free; Cloud Free ($0, 1M tokens); Cloud Pro $2.50 per 1M tokens; Enterprise | Free (1,000 credits/mo) · Flex $125/mo ($104 annual) · Flex Plus $375/mo · Enterprise custom |
| Free / trial | Open source free to self host, plus a free cloud tier with 1 million tokens and no card | Free tier: 1,000 credits/month (1 credit = 1 Episode up to 350 bytes) for development and low volume production. Open source Graphiti engine is free to self host. |
| Pricing confidence | public exact | public exact |
| Feature | C Cognee |
Z Zep |
|---|---|---|
| Action & orchestration | ||
|
Integrations & Tool Calling Ability to connect agents to real systems through native integrations, OAuth-authenticated actions, custom tools, APIs, webhooks, or MCP-compatible tools. |
Full / Explicit | Partial |
|
Workflow Orchestration Ability to sequence, branch, retry, route, and combine deterministic workflow nodes with autonomous agent steps. |
No / Not documented | No / Not documented |
|
Triggers & Channel Coverage How agents wake up and where they work: schedules, webhooks, message events, CRM events, inbox events, chat, email, voice, and collaboration tools. |
No / Not documented | No / Not documented |
| Knowledge & context | ||
|
Knowledge Grounding & RAG Ability to ground agent behavior in company data through document ingestion, retrieval, external knowledge APIs, semantic search, or RAG layers. |
Full / Explicit | Partial |
|
Memory & State Persistence Ability to persist context across a run, conversation, workflow, user, team, or longer-term memory layer. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
| Control & trust | ||
|
Human Oversight & Guardrails Approval steps, consent checkpoints, escalation rules, structured guardrails, policy constraints, and pause/resume controls. |
No / Not documented | No / Not documented |
|
Security, Identity & Governance RBAC, SSO, auditability, encryption, least-privilege tool access, compliance posture, and data handling policy. |
Partial | Partial |
|
Observability & Auditability Traces, logs, execution histories, metrics, audit events, and debugging detail for production agent behavior. |
Partial | Partial |
|
Deployment & Data Residency Deployment modes and options, including SaaS, dedicated cloud, VPC, on-prem, hybrid, local runtime, and self-hosting. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
| Solution readiness | ||
|
Prebuilt Agents, Templates & Packs Ready-made workflows, packaged employees, templates, blueprints, industry solutions, and role-specific agents that reduce time-to-value. |
No / Not documented | No / Not documented |
| Platform extensibility | ||
|
Model Flexibility & Routing Ability to work across multiple foundation models, route tasks to different models, or let buyers bring their own providers and keys. |
Partial | Partial |
|
APIs, SDKs & MCP Extensibility Composability layer: stable APIs, SDKs, MCP tool consumption/serving, custom tools, and integration into internal systems. |
Full / Explicit | Full / Explicit |
|
Testing, Debugging & Optimization Testing, debugging, scoring, retries, fallbacks, quality gates, and optimization loops for improving agent workflows before and after deployment. |
No / Not documented | No / Not documented |
| Specialist automation | ||
|
Browser & Computer Use Browser, desktop, or remote/local computer control for workflows that cannot be handled through stable APIs alone. |
No / Not documented | No / Not documented |
Pricing snapshot
Sourced from the Index pricing dataset · open each vendor's profile for full detail.
| Pricing | C Cognee |
Z Zep |
|---|---|---|
|
Entry price Lowest public entry point |
Open source self host free; Cloud Free ($0, 1M tokens); Cloud Pro $2.50 per 1M tokens; Enterprise | Free (1,000 credits/mo) · Flex $125/mo ($104 annual) · Flex Plus $375/mo · Enterprise custom |
|
Pricing confidence How public the numbers are |
Public, exact | Public, exact |
|
Billing Primary billing axis |
tokens processed | Subscription tiers plus credits consumed by data ingestion (1 credit per Episode up to 350 bytes, +1 per additional 350 bytes); retrieval, storage, threads, users, and graph storage consume zero credits |
|
Variable cost Workload / overage exposure |
Medium variable cost | Low variable cost |
|
Free tier / trial Try before you buy |
Free tier
|
Free tier
|
|
Buying motion Self-serve vs sales call |
Mixed | Self-serve |
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