Comparison
Contextely vs Cognee
Cognee is a toolkit for building your own memory layer. Contextely is a finished one with two opinions baked in: nothing is served past its TTL without a re-check, and nothing is scored for an asker who may not see it.
What Cognee is
An open-source memory/ETL layer for AI: pipelines that ingest documents and data, build a knowledge graph plus vector index, and serve them to your application.
Choose Cognee when
- You want to own and tune the ingestion pipeline, the graph schema and the embedding strategy.
- You are working over a large document corpus where graph structure genuinely helps.
- You want a library inside your own stack rather than a service with an opinion.
Choose Contextely when
- You want the opinion. Two decisions, freshness and entitlement, are made for you and made consistently.
- You are a 20-500 person company without a team to run a retrieval pipeline.
- You want an MCP endpoint your agents can use this afternoon.
| Dimension | Cognee | Contextely |
|---|---|---|
| Shape | Library and pipeline framework | Hosted or self-hosted service with an MCP + REST surface |
| Setup | Define pipelines, storage and graph schema | Point at a source, set a TTL, set scopes |
| Staleness handling | Memory is written when you write it; keeping it current is your pipeline's job | Every object carries a TTL and is re-fetched from its system of record at query time when it expires |
| Per-asker permissions | Not a built-in concept. The application above it is expected to scope what it stores and retrieves | Entitlement scopes applied inside the retrieval scoring function, before synthesis; unentitled objects score zero |
| Self-host | Open source, self-hostable | Open self-host path, Docker, no feature gating |
Memory objects
5 of 100Acme Industrial: renewal terms
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Q3 churn commitments to Acme
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Support SLA by plan tier
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Northwind pricing sheet v4
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Engineering comp bands 2026
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One object is past its TTL. The next query that selects it re-reads the record from its source before it answers, rather than serving what is stored.
What the store looks like
A cache with rules, not a second source of truth
Every object carries the TTL its source set and the moment it was last read. Anything past its window is re-read from the system of record before it is allowed to answer, so the store never quietly becomes the thing your company believes.
Free for 500 retrievals a month, and self-hostable with no limits.