Is Brain a Zep alternative?

They solve different problems that overlap on the word memory. Zep is long-term memory for an AI agent; Brain is governed company memory across many people, with per-requester access and a verifiable record. For company-wide governance and proof, Brain; for one agent's time-aware user memory, Zep.

Does Brain have a temporal graph too?

Yes. Brain's knowledge graph is bi-temporal, so as-of questions are answerable. Zep's temporal graph is a core strength of its memory product; the two emphasise different jobs around the same idea.

Compare

Brain vs Zep

Long-term memory for one AI agent, and governed company memory for everyone.

Zep is a memory platform for AI agents: time-aware recall of a user's conversations and facts on a temporal knowledge graph. Brain governs a company's shared knowledge, so every person and every agent only reaches what they are cleared for, with a content-blind record you can re-verify offline. Both govern memory. They differ in scope and in what can be proved: Zep governs an agent's memory for a developer, Brain governs a company's knowledge per person, with a record your auditor re-checks themselves.

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Why teams compare them

People and agents, one grid
A company's memory has many readers, and the agents are the ones nobody scoped carefully. Brain checks every recall against who is asking, whichever kind of reader that is.
Hold back the field, not the memory
Memory extracted from real sessions picks up customer names and figures along the way. Brain withholds those and serves the rest, rather than dropping the memory entirely.
Where Zep is the better fit
If you are building an agent and want deep, time-aware memory of one user's interactions, on a temporal graph with clean developer ergonomics, Zep is purpose-built for exactly that.

The questions people actually ask about Zep

Our agent already remembers. What is this for?

For the other readers. Zep gives one agent a long memory of one user, and does it well.

Brain's unit is a company: several people and several agents drawing on the same knowledge, where the interesting question is not what was remembered but who else may recall it.

Fine. But our memory platform has governance too.

It does, and a serious amount of it: retention rules, access controls and audit across the platform.

The difference is who has to be trusted. Brain's record is content-blind and re-verifiable offline, so an auditor re-checks the chain themselves rather than accepting the vendor's report of it.

Alright. But a colleague still can't see where a recall came from.

In a per-user agent memory there is nobody else to show, which is a reasonable design for that job.

Shared, provenance is the difference between an answer somebody acts on and one they quietly re-check. Brain returns the sources behind each claim, each of them already filtered to the person asking.

And the knowledge that was never in a conversation?

Most of a company's knowledge was not. It is in repositories, drives, ticket queues and chat threads that nobody thought to narrate to an agent.

Brain reads those in place, with their permissions intact, so an agent's recall is not limited to what somebody happened to say to it.

At a glance

Brain compared with Zep, attribute by attribute.
Attribute	Brain	Zep
Core job	Governed company knowledge: retrieval checked per person, plus proof	Agent memory: time-aware recall of a user's conversations and facts
Access governance	YesFiltered per requester across company-wide knowledge, for many people, with field-level redaction	PartlyGoverns an agent's own memory, with access controls and retention
Audit and proof	YesContent-blind record you re-verify offline, without taking the vendor's word, plus an optional on-chain anchor	PartlyPlatform-managed governance and audit
Temporal graph	Bi-temporal knowledge graph, for as-of questions	Graphiti, a temporal knowledge graph, and a genuine core strength
Shape	A governed company brain many people and agents share	A memory layer a developer embeds in an agent

Compared against publicly available information, last checked 20 September 2026. Products change. Tell us if something here is out of date: hello@heybrain.io

Who each one is for

Choose Brain if

Governing company-wide knowledge per person, with field-level redaction
A content-blind, tamper-evident record, optionally anchored on-chain
Many people and agents sharing one brain, each seeing only what they are cleared for
Proof a board or an auditor will accept

Choose Zep if

Deep, time-aware long-term memory for a single AI agent
Developers who want clean agent-memory ergonomics
Teams that want a temporal knowledge graph at the centre of their memory

We are not ripping out the memory our agent already uses.

You would not be. These sit at different levels and compose rather than compete.

Let your agent keep its own per-user memory, and let Brain govern the company knowledge that agent draws on, with every access filtered and recorded.

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Questions, answered

Is Brain a Zep alternative?: They solve different problems that overlap on the word memory. Zep is long-term memory for an AI agent; Brain is governed company memory across many people, with per-requester access and a verifiable record. For company-wide governance and proof, Brain; for one agent's time-aware user memory, Zep.
Does Brain have a temporal graph too?: Yes. Brain's knowledge graph is bi-temporal, so as-of questions are answerable. Zep's temporal graph is a core strength of its memory product; the two emphasise different jobs around the same idea.
Can I use both?: Yes. Let Zep hold an agent's per-user memory and let Brain govern the company knowledge that agent draws on, with every access filtered and recorded.