Zep is a temporal knowledge graph for enterprise agent memory. Multi-container deployment. 897 seconds to ingest 35 beliefs. Mean precision: 0.09.
Zep's async ingestion architecture creates a structural availability problem in conversational use. Individual beliefs reach 125,148ms during ingestion. At a mean of 25,630ms per belief against a conversational turn cadence of 10 to 30 seconds, a belief introduced at turn 1 may not be queryable until the session has largely concluded.
Tenure extracts beliefs during the stream and makes them available on the very next turn. The session-turn evaluation confirms this: all 12 session cases pass, including turn N+1 availability.
Memory that takes 15 minutes to become queryable is not memory. It is a batch pipeline. Conversational memory requires sub-second write-to-read latency. Zep's graph construction overhead makes this architecturally impossible at conversational cadence.
After topic drift, Zep produces drift score 0.89 on the re-entry turn. It surfaces noise beliefs introduced during unrelated drift turns while retaining the correct belief in the result set at low rank. The model receives noise alongside signal and must sort it out at inference time.
Session-turn latency: 418.13ms p50 (3x degradation over single-turn baseline of 139.64ms).
Zep requires a multi-container deployment including a graph store and embedding pipeline. Tenure runs as a single Docker container on localhost.
| Property | Tenure | Zep |
|---|---|---|
| Mean retrieval precision | 1.00 | 0.09 |
| Active retrieval passes | 43/43 | 0/43 |
| Total passes (89 cases) | 89/89 | 9/89 |
| Retrieval latency (p50) | 9.77ms | 124.36ms |
| Session latency (p50) | 47.79ms | 418.13ms |
| Drift score | 0.00 | 0.89 |
| Ingestion (35 beliefs) | 1.0s | 897s |
| Deployment | Single container | Multi-container (graph + embed) |
| Runs fully local | Always | Cloud-first (self-host available) |
| Account required | No | Yes |
| Scope isolation | Hard filter | None native |
| Supersession handling | Chain with audit | Temporal invalidation |
| Turn N+1 availability | Yes | No (async ingestion) |
| Per-turn injection audit | Yes | No |
| License | MIT | Proprietary (cloud) / BSL |
Zep evaluated against pinned Docker image digest zep-zep@sha256:f9e5372caf60. Full methodology: arXiv:2605.11325. Dataset: HuggingFace.
No graph store. No embedding pipeline. No async ingestion gap. Thirty seconds to install.