Mem0 alternatives, 2026.Q3: every real option, ranked
The short answer
Edition v2026.Q3 · pricing and status verified 2026-08-06.
Zep is the strongest Mem0 alternative for most — enterprises whose agents must remember evolving business facts — temporal knowledge graphs over chat plus CRM/app data, with provenance tracking and access control. Then: Letta · Supermemory · Cognee. Below, all 17 real options in the memory layer category, with pricing and honest watch-outs — plus the 6 "alternatives" other lists still recommend that are dead, renamed, or sunsetting.
Why people look past Mem0 at all: Its 'SOTA' LoCoMo claims are disputed — Zep published a rebuttal showing a corrected implementation beat Mem0's setup, and Mem0's own paper had a full-context baseline outperforming it. Retrieval quotas bite: 1k retrievals/mo free and 5k on the $19 tier push retrieval-heavy apps to $249 quickly.
The top Mem0 alternatives, ranked
2ZepZep AI
Free 10k credits/mo · Flex $1,250/yr · Flex Plus $3,750/yr · Emerging Cos $13k/first year (SOC 2, HIPAA BAA) · Enterprise customBest for Enterprises whose agents must remember evolving business facts — temporal knowledge graphs over chat plus CRM/app data, with provenance tracking and access control.
Watch No cheap paid tier — the jump from free to $1,250/yr excludes hobbyists, and the self-hosted Community Edition was deprecated (code moved to legacy/), so the real product is cloud-only. Its 94.7% LoCoMo / 90.2% LongMemEval numbers are vendor-run, like everyone else's.
3LettaLetta (ex-MemGPT, UC Berkeley)
Free · Pro $20/mo (20 stateful agents) · Developer $0.10/active agent/mo + $0.00015/sec tool exec · Enterprise customBest for Building agents whose memory and self-improvement are the product — stateful agents that learn across sessions, from the researchers who invented the pattern.
Watch Strategic churn is real: the Mar 16, 2026 'next phase' deprecated large chunks of the platform (Filesystem, server-side templates, MCP integrations, sleep-time agents, tool rules), and the original server repo is now labeled legacy. Smallest disclosed war chest of the leaders.
4SupermemorySupermemory
Free (~$5 usage) · Pro $19/mo · Max $100/mo · Scale $399/mo · Enterprise custom (self-host)Best for High-volume, cost-sensitive context: memory + RAG + connectors (Slack, Gmail, Drive, GitHub) in one API, plus a personal memory app that follows you across AI tools.
Watch Tiny funding versus rivals and a split focus (consumer app + infra API). Benchmark leadership claims (LongMemEval, LoCoMo, ConvoMem) and the Google/Nissan logos are vendor-sourced with no independent verification.
5CogneeTopoteretes
OSS free (Apache-2.0) · Cloud: Free 1M tokens · Standard $2.50/1M tokens + $5/workspace · Enterprise custom (BYO cloud)Best for Teams who want to own the memory pipeline — an open-source ECL (extract-cognify-load) engine that builds combined knowledge-graph + vector memory over your own databases.
Watch The smallest commercial operation in the top 5 — funding undisclosed (Pebblebed and others, amounts unannounced) — and the ECL pipeline demands data-engineering appetite that Mem0's two-line SDK doesn't.
Every other live option in memory layer
| Tool | Maker | What it is | Entry |
|---|---|---|---|
| Graphiti | Zep (Apache-2.0) | Temporal knowledge-graph framework under Zep's cloud — 29k stars, v0.29.2 Jun 2026; the OSS on-ramp to Zep | free + your infra |
| OpenMemory | Mem0 | Local-first MCP memory for coding agents (Cursor, Claude Code, VS Code) — project-scoped preference recall | free |
| LangMem | LangChain (MIT) | Memory SDK for LangGraph agents — only 1.5k stars and increasingly folded into LangGraph's own persistence story | free + your infra |
| Claude memory + memory tool | Anthropic | Native memory in Claude (Oct 23, 2025, 559 HN points) plus a GA client-side memory tool for developers — the bundling threat in person | bundled |
| ChatGPT memory | OpenAI | Automatic, continuously-updated memory replaced the manual system; consumer-side only, no developer API exposure | bundled |
| AgentCore Memory | AWS | Metered memory primitive in Bedrock AgentCore — $0.25/1k events, $0.75/1k records/mo stored; commoditization from above | $0.25/1k events |
| Memory Bank | Google (Vertex AI Agent Engine) | Managed long-term user memory for Vertex agents — Google's answer to the same primitive | usage-based |
| Redis Agent Memory Server / Iris | Redis | OSS reference implementation (296 stars) graduated into Redis Iris, a managed agent-memory service on Redis Cloud | free OSS · cloud usage |
| MemU | NevaMind AI | 14.2k-star lightweight memory-as-markdown-wiki across agents and devices; auto-extracts reusable skills from session logs | free + tokens |
| Honcho | Plastic Labs | Peer-modeling memory (AGPL, 4.9k stars) — background reasoning builds psychological representations of users; managed at api.honcho.dev | free + managed tier |
| Memobase | memodb.io | Profile-based long-term memory (2.7k stars) — structured user profiles + time-aware events, sub-100ms retrieval focus | free + tokens |
| MIRIX | Mirix AI | Six-type multi-agent memory (3.5k stars) with screen-observation capture — personal-assistant angle, local-first | free |
| Hyperspell | Hyperspell | 'Company brain' context graph over 50+ SaaS sources surfaced as an agent-readable filesystem — overlaps element Kw | unverified |
The "Mem0 alternatives" to avoid — no longer what they were
Listicles still recommend these. As of 2026-08-06, they are not what the listicles think.
| Tool | Status | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| Memary | fading | Knowledge-graph agent memory, 2.6k stars — last release Oct 2024, momentum gone |
| Papr | fading | Former memory-API startup; site now sells AI GTM workflow apps — memory positioning quietly abandoned |
| MemGPT | renamed | The Oct 2023 paper/project that started the category — renamed Letta with the Sep 2024 commercialization |
| Zep Community Edition | dead | The self-hosted OSS memory server that built Zep's following — deprecated, code moved to legacy/; cloud-only now |
| Motorhead | dead | Early Rust memory/retrieval server for LLMs — unsupported since Dec 2023; the category's first grave |
| Rayrift | dead | Developer-focused memory layer listed for takeover/acquisition on HN, Jan 31, 2026 — a marker of how crowded the low end got |
How to choose
- If you have a working app and just need it to remember users across sessions, this week
- Mem0 — free for 10k memory-adds a month, $19 after, two-line SDK, works with any model. Watch the retrieval quota, not the add quota.
- If you're an enterprise whose agents must track facts that change over time — accounts, policies, patient state — with audit and access control
- Zep. Temporal graph with provenance and ABAC is the point; budget $1,250/yr minimum, $13k if you need SOC 2 II + HIPAA BAA as a startup.
- If the agent itself is the product and it must demonstrably learn and improve over weeks
- Letta — the MemGPT lineage, sleep-time compute, and git-backed memory you can inspect and version. Accept the platform-pivot risk.
- If you're ingesting everything — email, Slack, docs, screenshots — and cost per token retrieved decides the architecture
- Supermemory: connector-heavy, sub-300ms claims, and SMFS cut agentic retrieval costs 55% by the vendor's own math. Verify their benchmarks against your data.
- If one assistant, one user, one vendor — 'my chatbot should remember me'
- Don't buy a layer. Claude and ChatGPT memory do this natively, and Anthropic's client-side memory tool is GA for developers. A standalone memory layer only earns its keep across models, apps, or agents.
This analysis is drawn from the Memory Layer element dossier — the ranked top 5, the comparison matrix, and the complete field of 19 more tools live there, with every source. Data: mm.json (CC BY 4.0).
Every claim above is dated and sourced from the elems dossiers — 1,421 tools tracked across 58 categories, verified 2026-08-06, including the 276 we found dead, renamed, acquired, or sunsetting. Rankings are editorial, never paid — the charter.
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