COMPARE
Rohrpost vs. native AI memory
The biggest competitor to a memory layer isn't another memory layer — it's the memory your AI client already ships with. Here's the honest comparison.
The real competition is native memory
Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor all ship some form of built-in memory now. For a lot of people that's genuinely enough — it's zero-setup and it's already there. Rohrpost exists for a different situation: you use more than one of these tools on the same project, you want your knowledge base on your own hardware, or you want to actually see and query the relationships between the things your AI has learned instead of trusting an opaque memory feature to surface the right thing at the right time.
Native memory is siloed by construction — what Claude Desktop remembers, Cursor can't see, and vice versa. It's also single-vendor: your project's accumulated context lives inside that vendor's infrastructure, in their format, on their terms. If you switch tools or want a second opinion from a different model, you start over.
Feature comparison
| Dimension | Rohrpost | Native client memory (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor) | Other memory layers (mem0, Zep, Letta, LangMem) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Self-hosted option | Yes — Docker Compose on your own hardware | No — vendor-hosted only | Varies by product; typically hosted-first, some offer open-source cores |
| Cross-tool | Yes — one knowledge base over MCP for any client, plus an OpenAI-compatible proxy for the rest | No — scoped to that one vendor's apps | Yes, typically — most integrate as an SDK across clients |
| Retrieval | Hybrid: vector + BM25 + real graph traversal (Apache AGE), RRF-merged, with optional cross-encoder reranking | Undisclosed, product-internal | Varies — mostly vector-based; graph support differs by product and is often a separate add-on |
| Portable export | Yes — Open Knowledge Format (OKF), a vendor-neutral snapshot you can back up or move | No standard export | Varies by product and pricing tier |
| Tenant isolation | Real Postgres schema per tenant, not soft row-level scoping | N/A (single account, single vendor) | Varies — often row-level multi-tenancy in a shared database |
| Open source | Yes — full source on Codeberg | No | Varies — several are open-core |
We keep this table honest by describing what we know and marking what varies rather than asserting specifics about products we don't operate — check each vendor's current docs before making a decision based on a fast-moving space.
Where Rohrpost asks more of you
This isn't a one-sided pitch. Self-hosting means you run Postgres, NATS, and the rest of the stack yourself (or use the managed option, which narrows this gap) — that's real operational weight a fully-hosted native memory feature doesn't have. Rohrpost is also a smaller, younger project than the incumbents baked into Claude or ChatGPT; if you want the absolute path of least resistance and only use one AI tool, native memory may be all you need.
Where Rohrpost wins
If you move between Claude Code, Cursor, and VS Code on the same project — or you want your team's accumulated knowledge to outlive any one vendor's product decisions — a shared, self-hostable, inspectable knowledge base is the thing native memory structurally can't be. That's the bet Rohrpost makes.