5 Shared AI Memory Tools for Enterprise Teams, Ranked by Compliance

The shortlist, ranked by compliance

Summary

• Compliance is the real gate: Zep Cloud is the only tool with primary-verified SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA; Mem0's certifications are self-reported, while Cognee, Letta, and Graphiti have no vendor certificate.
• Architecture varies by vendor: Zep/Graphiti use temporal graphs with validity windows, Mem0 reconciles via ADD/UPDATE/DELETE/NOOP, and Letta uses Core/Recall/Archival tiers.
• Don't trust benchmarks alone: Mem0 has ~62.7k GitHub stars vs ~29.6k for Zep/Graphiti and ~24.1k for Letta, but its self-reported LongMemEval score of 94.4 fell to 49.0 in independent testing.
• Pricing is not comparable: Mem0 bills per memory-add/retrieval, Letta per model usage plus tool-execution seconds, and Zep by Episode byte credits, so normalize usage before cost comparisons.
• Self-hosted means you own compliance: Cognee, Letta, and Graphiti are self-hostable but carry no vendor certificate; for regulated teams, pair the chosen memory layer with a deterministic, audit-ready execution layer like Jinba Flow.
• Zep Cloud: for enterprises that need SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA certification already in place
• Mem0: for teams that will accept a self-reported compliance posture in exchange for the largest open-source community
• Cognee: for teams that must self-host but want multi-tenant isolation built in by default
• Letta: for teams building agent-native memory tiers who want full self-hosting control
• Graphiti: for teams that want Zep's temporal graph model with zero vendor dependency

Enterprise AI programs stall for a specific reason: every agent starts a session from zero, has no way to see what another agent or teammate already learned, and returns answers that are stale or invented because no persistent, permission-aware layer connects it to the CRM, the ticketing system, or the last conversation a colleague had with it. A persistent, permission-aware memory layer shared across agents and teammates is what keeps these deployments from becoming another failed pilot. That same persistence is the reason shared AI memory tools for enterprise teams cannot be chosen on architecture alone. The moment memory holds customer, patient, or financial data, certification, deployment model, and access control become the gating decision rather than a footnote to it.

The four criteria below are ordered by how much weight each carries in a compliance review, heaviest first.

Certification and compliance standing decides whether a security team can sign off without commissioning its own audit. Skipping this criterion is how a self-reported claim gets treated as if a third party had verified it.

Deployment model and data residency decides whether sensitive records leave the enterprise's own infrastructure, and under what encryption and key-ownership terms. Getting this wrong means discovering the data-residency problem after the contract is signed, not before.

Access control and audit trail decides whether the tool can prove, after the fact, who read or changed what. A memory layer without RBAC, SSO, and audit logging is a liability, not a feature list.

Architecture and production readiness decides how the tool behaves once a fact is corrected or a team scales past a pilot. The memory model (graph, tiered, or reconcile-based) and the maturity of its community determine whether that behavior is predictable.

1. Zep Cloud

Zep is a managed memory platform built on a temporal knowledge graph: it constructs one Context Graph per subject (a user, a customer, a team, or a topic) and serves many of these Context Graphs inside what Zep calls a governed Context Lake. Facts inside that graph carry valid_at/invalid_at validity windows, so a corrected fact is invalidated rather than deleted, which is the direct architectural answer to agents returning stale information.

On compliance, Zep leads the field. Zep Cloud holds SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA certification, with deployment options spanning Cloud, Bring-Your-Own-Key, and Bring-Your-Own-Cloud. Its security and governance documentation covers customer-managed encryption, Bring-Your-Own-LLM, role-based access control, enterprise SSO, policy-based and attribute-based access control down to per-agent granularity, user-group access, audit logging, and API logging: the fullest documented control set of any tool in this list. It also ships with a dedicated Memory MCP Server for agent integration. One qualification matters for budget owners: the SOC 2 Type II report and HIPAA Business Associate Agreement are not available on Zep's entry tier. They begin at the Flex Plus tier ($375/month billed monthly), so a security team should confirm which tier it is purchasing rather than assume the certifications come with every plan.

Pros:

• SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA certification confirmed from Zep's own compliance documentation, with BYOK/BYOC options that move the trust boundary onto the customer's infrastructure
• Granular access control (RBAC, per-agent ABAC, user-group access) built for the multi-team, multi-agent sharing pattern enterprises need

Cons:

• Zep bills by credits tied to Episode byte size, a unit that does not correspond with other vendors' pricing and complicates a finance-side cost comparison
• The managed Context Lake model requires trusting Zep's infrastructure even under BYOC, which some data-sovereignty mandates will not accept regardless of certification

Best for enterprises that need an audited compliance posture without building one internally.

2. Mem0

Mem0 uses a two-phase LLM extraction-and-reconcile model: memories are proposed, then reconciled against existing state through ADD, UPDATE, DELETE, or NOOP operations. It is also the most adopted open-source memory project in the category by a substantial margin. Mem0 carries roughly 62.7k GitHub stars against Zep/Graphiti's ~29.6k and Letta's ~24.1k, all three released under Apache-2.0.

That community scale is real, but it sits alongside a compliance and evidence gap a security review needs to see. Mem0 markets SOC 2 Type 1, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance through its own trust center, but those claims sit behind a JavaScript-heavy page that does not expose certificate specifics to direct verification the way Zep's documentation does. The same caution applies to Mem0's published benchmarks. Mem0 self-reports a 94.4 score on LongMemEval, while an independent third-party measurement put it at 49.0: a 45.4-point gap. Each of the major vendors in this category also publishes on a different benchmark, which makes cross-vendor comparison unreliable without independent verification. Pricing follows its own unit as well: Mem0 bills memory-add and retrieval requests, distinct from Zep's credit-based billing or Letta's usage-based model.

Pros:

• The largest and most active open-source community of the three flagship memory projects, which shortens the path to community-tested integrations
• The ADD/UPDATE/DELETE/NOOP reconcile model gives fine-grained control over how a memory changes over time

Cons:

• SOC 2 Type 1, HIPAA, and GDPR claims could not be verified in full detail from a primary compliance document, unlike Zep's
• Its published benchmark performance carries a documented, large gap against independent measurement, which should push a compliance-minded buyer to run its own evaluation before trusting vendor-reported numbers

Best for teams prioritizing ecosystem size and flexibility and willing to run their own compliance verification in parallel.

3. Cognee

Cognee is a self-hosted-first platform, and its security model reflects that. Rather than a vendor certificate, it ships environment-variable-level hardening controls: ENABLE_BACKEND_ACCESS_CONTROL, REQUIRE_AUTHENTICATION, JWT token secrets and lifetimes, and default-user credential management, all intended to harden a deployment before it is exposed to untrusted users. Its default operating mode is multi-tenant, with per-user and per-dataset isolated databases and authenticated API endpoints, which is a more structured starting point for team-level isolation than most self-hosted alternatives offer out of the box.

Cognee holds no vendor-issued SOC 2 or HIPAA certification of its own. Because it is self-hosted, that compliance burden sits with the operator, not the vendor. What it does provide is documentation depth on the pieces that burden actually requires: dedicated Permissions Setup, Multi-User Mode, Logging, MCP (via a cognee-mcp integration), and a self-hosted Deploy guide, alongside a Cognee Cloud option for teams that later want a managed path.

Pros:

• Multi-tenant isolation with per-user/dataset databases is the default posture, not an add-on configuration a team has to build itself
• Documented, granular hardening controls (auth requirements, JWT lifetimes, access-control flags) give a security team a concrete checklist rather than a vague self-hosting mandate

Cons:

• No vendor-held SOC 2 or HIPAA certificate exists to hand to an auditor; every compliance claim must be substantiated by the operator's own configuration and audit
• Multi-tenant isolation still requires the enterprise to run and secure the underlying infrastructure, which is real operational overhead compared with a managed offering

Best for teams with in-house security capability who need per-tenant isolation without a vendor dependency.

4. Letta

Letta organizes memory into agent-curated tiers: Core memory held in-context, Recall memory as searchable history, and Archival memory as a vector store the agent queries on demand. That tiered model gives an agent explicit control over what stays immediately visible versus what gets retrieved on demand. It is a different bet from Zep's graph or Mem0's reconcile approach.

Letta's documentation includes a dedicated self-hosting page, a pricing page, a 'shared memory' concept, a Permissions configuration section, and an ACP (Agent Communication Protocol) integration, alongside Cloud agents for GitHub and Slack. It is fully self-hostable, and permissions are something the operator configures rather than something a vendor certifies. No SOC 2 or HIPAA certification has been verified for Letta, and it bills on model usage plus tool-execution seconds: a third distinct pricing unit in a category where none of the three flagship vendors bills the same way.

Pros:

• The Core/Recall/Archival tier model maps onto how an agent reasons about what to keep close versus what to look up
• Native ACP integration and a documented self-hosting path give engineering teams direct control over deployment topology

Cons:

• Permissions are a configuration the team owns and maintains, not a certified guarantee from the vendor
• No third-party or vendor-issued compliance certification exists to shortcut a security review

Best for teams building custom agent frameworks who want tiered, agent-native memory control.

5. Graphiti

Graphiti is the open-source layer underneath Zep. It builds one temporal Context Graph per subject and runs locally, using the same fact-invalidation model (valid_at/invalid_at windows rather than deletion) that Zep Cloud runs at managed scale. The distinction that matters for a compliance-first evaluation is that self-hosting "Zep" today means running Graphiti plus a separate graph database (Neo4j, FalkorDB, or Kuzu); the legacy self-contained Community Edition server is deprecated. This is infrastructure assembly, not a one-binary deployment.

Per Zep's own comparison table, Graphiti is self-managed with no vendor certification and self-hosted only. There is no SOC 2, no HIPAA attestation, and no managed BYOK/BYOC path, because no vendor stands behind the deployment. Every control that Zep Cloud documents (RBAC, SSO, audit logging, encryption key management) has to be built and operated by the team running Graphiti directly.

Pros:

• The same temporal knowledge graph and fact-invalidation model as Zep Cloud, fully open-source and free of vendor lock-in
• Complete control over data location and infrastructure, with no managed dependency to negotiate

Cons:

• No vendor certification of any kind exists to present to an auditor; the entire compliance and access-control stack must be built in-house
• Requires assembling and operating a separate graph database alongside Graphiti, more infrastructure work than a managed alternative

Best for teams that want Zep's graph architecture with zero vendor dependency and full internal ownership of compliance.

Side-by-side comparison

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between AI agent memory and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)? RAG is stateless retrieval: it pulls relevant documents into a context window for a single call and forgets them afterward. Memory is persistent state the agent curates and references across turns and users. Zep's temporal graph with validity windows, Mem0's reconcile operations, and Letta's Core/Recall/Archival tiers are three different mechanisms for making that state durable rather than rebuilding it on every call. For a deeper treatment of how the two layers differ, see our guide to enterprise RAG architecture for regulated industries.

Do enterprises need a workflow orchestration layer in addition to a memory tool? Memory answers what an agent remembers; it does not answer how that memory gets executed safely across a team, which system it touches, or whether the execution path is deterministic enough to pass an audit. That is a separate layer. Jinba Flow, a SOC 2 compliant workflow builder for regulated enterprises, is built for that layer. It builds workflows once, using deterministic, largely rule-based execution rather than stochastic agent calls on every step, and shares them across an entire operations team with role-based permissions, audit logging, SSO, and on-premise deployment for air-gapped environments. It is not a memory tool and does not compete on the criteria above; it is the execution and governance layer a team adds once it has decided how memory itself will be stored and secured. Why Deterministic Workflows Solve Audit Compliance and LLM Cost Collapse at Once details the architectural difference.

Which of these tools are actually self-hostable for full data sovereignty? Cognee, Letta, and Graphiti are all self-hostable, with Cognee defaulting to multi-tenant isolation and documented hardening controls, and Letta shipping a dedicated self-hosting page and permissions configuration. Graphiti requires pairing with a separate graph database (Neo4j, FalkorDB, or Kuzu) since the older self-contained Zep Community Edition server has been deprecated. Zep Cloud and Mem0 are managed-first, though Zep's BYOC option moves infrastructure onto the customer's own cloud.

Can vendor-published memory benchmarks be trusted when comparing these tools? Not on their own. Each vendor publishes on a different benchmark, and at least one documented case shows a large gap between a vendor's self-reported score and an independent measurement of the same model. Any enterprise justifying a build-vs-buy decision to finance or security should treat these numbers as marketing claims to be re-tested, not as settled evidence.

How comparable is pricing across these tools? It is not, by design of the billing units involved: Mem0 charges for memory-add and retrieval requests, Letta charges for model usage plus tool-execution seconds, and Zep charges credits based on Episode byte size. A total-cost-of-ownership comparison across these tools requires normalizing usage patterns to a common unit before the numbers mean anything, not taking list prices at face value.