Announcing a New Direction for Zep's Open Source Strategy

Since launching Zep, we've provided the Zep memory service under an Apache 2.0 license as part of an open-core strategy, alongside our commercial cloud product. We've deeply appreciated the community’s enthusiasm and support. Now, we're taking a candid look at our open-source journey and clarifying our path forward.

Reflecting on the Open-Core Model

Managing two related but different products—a fully open-source community-supported version and a feature-rich, multi-tenant commercial service—has presented real challenges. We often found ourselves making compromises, with design choices in one limiting the other. It was challenging to balance resources, leading us to under-invest in the open-source version. Updates slowed down, and we weren't able to engage with the community as actively as we wanted. Over time, it became clear that our current open-source approach wasn't aligning well with our team's actual capabilities and values.

Aligning Our Actions with Our Values

We also felt uneasy about the common practice in open-core of intentionally limiting features to drive users toward paid products. For us, openness should be genuine—not just a marketing tactic or stepping stone to monetization.

Discontinuing Zep Community Edition

With these considerations in mind, we've decided to stop maintaining and releasing Zep Community Edition. The existing repository will remain open under the Apache 2.0 license, but we will no longer provide updates or active support.

This decision wasn't made lightly, but we believe it's better to be transparent and focus on areas where we can genuinely deliver consistent value and meaningful collaboration.

Focusing on Graphiti for Open Source

Moving forward, our open-source efforts will concentrate on Graphiti, Zep's temporal knowledge graph framework. Graphiti was built to overcome limitations in RAG systems by providing real-time knowledge to agents through temporally-aware graphs.

Unlike RAG and Graph RAG, Graphiti incrementally integrates user interactions, enterprise data, and external knowledge without requiring batch recomputation. The framework continuously updates entities, relationships, and communities, instantly resolving conflicts using detailed temporal metadata. This approach allows for accurate historical reconstructions and effective handling of dynamic, frequently updated data.

Graphiti is a standalone, feature-rich framework that can be implemented in many types of AI applications. It powers Zep’s commercial service, ensuring continued focus from our engineering team. Importantly, Graphiti doesn’t compete directly with Zep’s memory service—eliminating uncomfortable product-management gymnastics in support of commercialization.

Resource Transparency and Clear Community Expectations

To make the most of our team's bandwidth, narrowing our open-source efforts will help us deliver better quality, useful documentation, and meaningful community interactions around Graphiti. We aim to clearly communicate our limitations and strengths, fostering trust and respect within our developer community.

Join Us in Building Graphiti

Graphiti is available now under the Apache 2.0 license on GitHub, complete with clear guidelines for contributing and thorough documentation. We welcome your feedback, contributions, and ideas to make Graphiti better.

Thanks Again

We're grateful for your support and excited about collaborating openly with you on Graphiti.

— Daniel

Next Steps

• Visit the Graphiti GitHub repo.
• Read the Graphiti documentation.
• Join the Graphiti Discord.