Comparison

Busabase vs Zep for AI Agents

Zep is a context layer: it turns conversations, documents, and business data into a temporal knowledge graph and hands each agent the context it needs, turn by turn. Busabase is where your agents and your team keep the work itself — records, docs, Skills, and apps — and every change an agent makes arrives as a Change Request a person can read, review, and roll back.

One gives an agent a memory. The other gives a team records it can inspect and own. Many teams will want both; this page compares them by the jobs people actually bring to them.

Last verified 13 November 2026 against Zep's pricing page, documentation, engineering blog, and the Graphiti repository, and Busabase's current product.

The short verdict

The core difference: every change is a Change Request

Think of it as a pull request for your data. In Busabase, every edit — a record, a Doc, a Skill file, a schema change — is a Change Request: a branch with a chain of immutable commits. Merging moves the record forward; nothing is overwritten.

Zep works the other way round, by design. You send it episodes — messages, documents, JSON records — and “an LLM-driven pipeline” extracts entities and facts into the graph. When a new fact contradicts an old one, the old fact is invalidated and kept with an end date, so the graph remembers what it used to believe. That is real history, but it is the pipeline's reading of your data, and deciding what is allowed into memory stays with you: Zep's docs say “your application remains responsible for prompt construction, memory admission, tool permissions, and action authorization.” (Zep's Agent Skills, below, do have versions and an optional approval step.)

• A message and a diff on every write. Each change says what it does and shows the field-level before and after.
• Know which agent did it. The author, and the key or tool the change came through, stay on the commit.
• Undo is built in. Every record, Doc, and Skill keeps its full history, and any change can be rolled back.
• Review when you choose. Writes with write access land immediately. Give an agent a proposal-only key and its changes wait in the Inbox for a person to approve or send back.

That is the difference in one line: Zep records what its graph learned; Busabase records what your team decided — before it applies, if you want, and reversibly either way.

What else Busabase gives your agents and your team

A memory layer gives one agent context. These are the things a team needs around its agents' work, and in Busabase they come with the workspace.

Comparison by the job you are trying to do

Rows are the jobs teams bring to these two products, not feature checkboxes. Where Zep is the right tool, the table says so.

Coming next

Three features are being built now. They are not available yet; we list them so you can plan, and this page will be updated when they ship.

A graph your agent's pipeline maintains, or records your team owns

Zep is built for memory, and it is good at it. Every fact carries two timelines: “The event timeline records when the fact was true in the world” and “the system timeline records when Zep learned it.” “Each fact keeps a link to its source episode,” so an agent can answer what was true last March, not only what is true now. Zep keeps those graphs per user, per account, or per domain and assembles a Context Block for each turn.

The graph is derived, though. A model reads what you send and decides which entities and facts it contains; the people on your team are not the ones writing the facts. That is the right trade for memory — nobody wants to hand-maintain what a support agent learned from ten thousand chats — and the wrong one for the things a team has to stand behind: the refund policy, the price list, the customer's contract terms, the Skill that tells every agent how to quote.

Those belong in records a person can open, read in full, edit, and roll back. In Busabase the record is the source. An agent proposing a new discount rule produces a Change Request with the exact before and after; a teammate reads it in the Inbox or on a kanban board, merges it, and can undo it next week. The history is the team's decisions, not a model's inferences.

For the longer version of this distinction, read Agent memory vs knowledge base vs system of record.

Using them together

The two fit together without overlap. A common split:

1. Your team keeps policies, customer records, and the Skills your agents follow in Busabase. Every change, from a person or an agent, is a Change Request.
2. When a change merges, a webhook or an agent sends the updated record to Zep as a JSON episode, so the graph learns the new fact — and marks the old one as no longer valid.
3. At run time your support or sales agent asks Zep for context about this user and this account, turn by turn, and goes to Busabase when it needs the authoritative record in full.
4. What the agent produces — research, drafts, updated customer notes — goes back into Busabase as Change Requests your team can read and undo.

Neither replaces the other. Zep gives the agent a memory that keeps up with change; Busabase gives the team the records that memory should be built from.

Pricing at a glance

Prices as published on 13 November 2026; Zep's prices are billed monthly, and its page offers an annual discount. See Busabase pricing and Zep pricing for current details.

Where Zep is the better choice

• Your agent has to remember people across sessions. Long-running assistants and support agents that need to know what a user said last month, and what has changed since, are what Zep's temporal graph is built for.
• You want context assembled for you on every turn. Zep extracts facts, resolves entities, and returns a prompt-ready Context Block with low latency, and retrieval is not metered.
• You want a temporal graph inside your own stack. Graphiti, the framework inside Zep, is open source under Apache-2.0 and runs on Neo4j, FalkorDB, or Amazon Neptune.

Busabase's limits, plainly: it has no vector index, does not extract facts from conversations into a graph, and is not a per-turn memory service. It also has no realtime subscriptions, and sign-in for the end users of the apps you publish is in development (App users) but not available today. If you need agent memory now, run Zep alongside it.

Frequently asked questions

Next step

Connect an agent you already use and ask it to put one real piece of team knowledge into Busabase — a policy, a customer table, a Skill. Then ask it to change something, and read the Change Request it produces.

Related reading: Agent memory vs knowledge base vs system of record · Busabase vs Mem0 · A system of record for AI agents · Busabase vs Supabase · How Change Requests work · Search and grep

Sources: Zep home page, Zep pricing, How Graph Creation Works (Zep docs), “Context graphs: two timelines for every fact” (Zep blog), Security & Compliance (Zep docs), “Introducing Zep Agent Skills” (Zep blog, 5 Nov 2026), Agent Skills learning and admission (Zep docs), Context MCP Server (Zep docs), Graphiti on GitHub, Zep's open-source strategy (Zep blog, 2 Apr 2025), Busabase pricing