Head to head

ArgosBrain vs Zep

Zep ships Graphiti + Neo4j. ArgosBrain ships in-process Rust.

What Zep does

Managed temporal knowledge graph (Graphiti) backed by Neo4j with bi-temporal edges.

What ArgosBrain does differently

In-process petgraph with no external DB, code-aware, on-prem by default.

What Zep is

The baseline, stated fairly.

Zep (Zep AI) is a managed service wrapping Graphiti (open-source temporal knowledge graph, Apache-2.0) backed by Neo4j in production. Each edge carries bi-temporal metadata (valid_at, invalid_at) rather than being overwritten.

Zep Community Edition was deprecated April 2025; self-hosters now use Graphiti directly.

How it actually works

Technical facts.

ArchitectureTemporal knowledge graph (Graphiti + Neo4j).
Write cost1 "credit" per episode on Cloud; internally multiple LLM calls.
Read costFree retrieval (no read-time LLM), bundled in credit/subscription.
BenchmarksDMR 94.8% (vs MemGPT 93.4%); LongMemEval +18.5% accuracy / −90% latency.
Code-specificNone. General conversational/business memory. No AST, no symbols.
PricingFlex $25/mo (10K credits), Flex Plus $75/mo, Enterprise custom. No free self-host.

Sources: Zep docs · Paper · Deprecation post

Verdict

Where each one wins.

↑ Where ArgosBrain wins

No Neo4j. ArgosBrain is in-process; Zep self-host requires Graphiti + a supported graph DB.
Code-native. Zep is conversation-first.
Cloud-optional. Zep CE is gone; you either pay Cloud or run raw Graphiti.
Symbol precision API.

↑ Where Zep wins

Bi-temporal edges are a serious architectural idea we draw inspiration from.
DMR 94.8% is the bar on that specific benchmark.
Managed service with SLAs and team features.

When to choose which

Honest recommendation.

Choose Zep if

Enterprise conversational agent
Need SLAs and budget

Choose ArgosBrain if

Coding agent
No network round-trip or external DB