Interstrata vs Zep
THE SHORT VERSION
Zep is a context engineering platform that builds temporal knowledge graphs for agent memory and retrieval. Interstrata is an accountability layer that reconstructs what happened across all your AI workflows, proves it with evidence, and tracks what it cost. Zep optimizes what agents know; Interstrata proves what agents did.
At a glance
Feature comparison
Sophisticated retrieval: temporal knowledge graph (Graphiti) tracks how facts change over time
Context assembly: purpose-built for assembling personalized, token-efficient context for agents
MCP-friendly: components designed for Model Context Protocol integration
Accountability, not context assembly: Interstrata answers 'what happened and can you prove it?' — Zep answers 'what context should my agent have?'
Provenance chain: every claim in Interstrata links to hash-verified source evidence
Custody profiles: three levels including full E2EE — Zep offers cloud or VPC, not user-controlled encryption
Incident survivability: one-click binders for postmortems and audits
Who should use which
Choose Zep if:
→ You need sophisticated context assembly for agent applications
→ Low-latency retrieval for voice or real-time agents is a priority
→ You want an open-source foundation for your context engineering layer
Choose Interstrata if:
→ You need to prove what agents did and answer 'was it worth it?'
→ Incident reconstruction and audit-ready exports are required
→ You want hash-verified provenance across all your AI sources