Against
NotebookLMconsumer notebook chat
Quality 3 · us 5
Speed 3 · us 4
Cost 4 · us 5
Scalability 1 · us 5
Traceability 2 · us 5
Their strengthFree and friendly for one person's notebook of sources.
Strongest disadvantagePer user, with notebook and source caps; no team permissions or tenants; citations at source level and no measured refusal.
How we scored this
NotebookLM: Generous free tier bundled into Google's consumer plans; a personal product by design.
Hippocampus: Quality: cited, checkable answers across documents. Speed: bounded retrieval with a latency ceiling; a page imports in seconds. Cost: understanding is paid once at ingest; a published per-credit tariff and a free tier. Scalability: workspaces with permissions, shared or dedicated EU stacks, field seats, MCP and API on every tier. Traceability: byte-exact quotes with the page and the original; refusal when the documents do not say.
Against
Zepagent memory (Graphiti)
Quality 2 · us 5
Speed 2 · us 4
Cost 2 · us 5
Scalability 3 · us 5
Traceability 1 · us 5
Their strengthTemporal memory for conversational agents — strong on what a user said, and when.
Strongest disadvantageBuilt for chat memory, not documents: credit-based pricing, eventually-consistent ingest, facts rather than cited passages.
How we scored this
Zep: Ingestion-metered credits from a three-figure monthly plan; self-host edition discontinued 2025; benchmarks are conversational, not document Q&A.
Hippocampus: Quality: cited, checkable answers across documents. Speed: bounded retrieval with a latency ceiling; a page imports in seconds. Cost: understanding is paid once at ingest; a published per-credit tariff and a free tier. Scalability: workspaces with permissions, shared or dedicated EU stacks, field seats, MCP and API on every tier. Traceability: byte-exact quotes with the page and the original; refusal when the documents do not say.
Against
PageIndexdocument retrieval API
Quality 3 · us 5
Speed 3 · us 4
Cost 3 · us 5
Scalability 2 · us 5
Traceability 3 · us 5
Their strengthCheap, quick indexing of a single long PDF with page-level provenance.
Strongest disadvantageNo passage quotes or refusal record; cross-document routing is a known weak spot; query-time reasoning is slow; no team or tenant model.
How we scored this
PageIndex: Per-page indexing with credits; vendor-run benchmark figures; a developer API rather than a product a team signs into.
Hippocampus: Quality: cited, checkable answers across documents. Speed: bounded retrieval with a latency ceiling; a page imports in seconds. Cost: understanding is paid once at ingest; a published per-credit tariff and a free tier. Scalability: workspaces with permissions, shared or dedicated EU stacks, field seats, MCP and API on every tier. Traceability: byte-exact quotes with the page and the original; refusal when the documents do not say.
Against
Gleanenterprise search
Quality 3 · us 5
Speed 3 · us 4
Cost 1 · us 5
Scalability 4 · us 5
Traceability 3 · us 5
Their strengthEnterprise search across every system with permissions inherited and SSO everywhere.
Strongest disadvantageSearch results and links rather than a checked, quoted answer; seat pricing with large minimums puts it out of reach below a large organisation.
How we scored this
Glean: Per-seat pricing with contract minimums; connectors and permission inheritance are the product.
Hippocampus: Quality: cited, checkable answers across documents. Speed: bounded retrieval with a latency ceiling; a page imports in seconds. Cost: understanding is paid once at ingest; a published per-credit tariff and a free tier. Scalability: workspaces with permissions, shared or dedicated EU stacks, field seats, MCP and API on every tier. Traceability: byte-exact quotes with the page and the original; refusal when the documents do not say.
Against
Cogneeknowledge-graph memory engine
Quality 3 · us 5
Speed 2 · us 4
Cost 2 · us 5
Scalability 3 · us 5
Traceability 2 · us 5
Their strengthOpen-source extract–cognify–load pipeline into a knowledge graph, good for domain schemas.
Strongest disadvantageWrite-side LLM cost and slow graph traversal; graph triples rather than cited passages; a developer framework to operate, not a product a team signs into.
How we scored this
Cognee: Open source with a metered cloud; practitioner notes on write-side cost and traversal latency.
Hippocampus: Quality: cited, checkable answers across documents. Speed: bounded retrieval with a latency ceiling; a page imports in seconds. Cost: understanding is paid once at ingest; a published per-credit tariff and a free tier. Scalability: workspaces with permissions, shared or dedicated EU stacks, field seats, MCP and API on every tier. Traceability: byte-exact quotes with the page and the original; refusal when the documents do not say.