Agent Memory vs. memory middleware

Q: Can I use LangChain or CrewAI with SurrealDB instead of their built-in memory?

Yes. Agent Memory has adapters for LangChain, OpenAI Agents, the Vercel AI SDK, Claude Code and n8n, and any other MCP-compatible client can use its seven MCP tools or its REST API.

Q: Where does Agent Memory keep its state?

In SurrealDB. Agent Memory is the stateless application tier on top, and the database holds the graph, vector, document, relational and geospatial state, so there is no separate memory store to keep in step.

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Middleware. Mem0, Zep and Letta sit between the agent and its storage, committing memory apart from state.

The cost. Separate stores add a service to run, a consistency gap and a second permission model for memory.

Agent Memory. Memory on SurrealDB, with facts and their history written in one transaction.

THE LANDSCAPE

A category with one shared limit

Mem0

LLM-driven extraction and consolidation, with optional graph storage. Strong developer experience over a set of separate stores.

Zep

Long-term memory with temporal knowledge graphs and entity extraction. The structure arrives as a separate service with its own consistency model.

Letta (MemGPT)

A self-editing memory framework where the agent manages its own context window. Memory sits outside the transactional boundary.

THE COMPARISON

A layer between the agent and its data. What the middleware adds, and what Agent Memory keeps in the database.

Consistency

Agent Memory

Memory middleware

Atomicity

One transactionFacts, documents, graph relationships, vectors and their history are written in one transaction.

Two systemsMemory commits in the middleware, state in the database, separately.

Where state lives

In the databaseThe application tier is stateless: every fact, vector and trace lives in SurrealDB.

In the service's storesEvery memory operation goes through the service, then its own set of separate stores.

Operations

Stores to run

One databaseOne SurrealDB instance holds graph, vector, document, relational and geospatial state.

Several storesA vector store, a document store and a graph engine that stay separate, behind a memory service.

Permissions

Deny by defaultContexts isolate tenants and Scopes grant per verb, and a key can only narrow its grants.

Two modelsOne permission model for memory, another for the data it refers to.

THE ALTERNATIVE

Memory on the database

Transactions

ACID memory

Facts, documents, graph relationships, vectors and their history are written in one transaction, so they cannot diverge.

How transactions work

Permissions

Deny-by-default permissions

Contexts isolate tenants, and Scopes grant per verb, so a key can only narrow what it may do.

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History

Memory with a history

A new value closes the validity of the old one instead of overwriting it, so what the agent believed on a given date is one query.

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HOW IT WORKS

Recall and remember in one transaction. In SurrealDB, an agent's memory and the data it concerns are read and written together.

1BEGIN TRANSACTION;
2
3-- Recall what the agent knows about this user
4LET $context = SELECT fact, valid_from FROM memory
5    WHERE agent = agent:support AND user = user:jaime
6    ORDER BY valid_from DESC LIMIT 5;
7
8-- Remember the outcome, beside the data it concerns
9CREATE memory SET
10    agent = agent:support,
11    user = user:jaime,
12    fact = "Moved to the Memory+ plan",
13    source = conversation:4471,
14    valid_from = time::now();
15
16COMMIT TRANSACTION;

TRUSTED BY

Enterprise teams building on SurrealDB

See more case studies

Three data stores collapsed into one

An AI assistant for 10,000 technicians

Nine backend tools consolidated into one

Low-latency RAG, under the customer's control

45 million recommendation queries a month

Memory middleware,answered

How does Agent Memory differ from Mem0 or Zep?

Mem0 and Zep are middleware layers between the agent and its storage, abstracting over a vector store, a document store and a graph engine that stay separate. Agent Memory is the stateless application tier on SurrealDB, so facts, documents, graph relationships, vectors and their history are written in one transaction.

Can I use LangChain or CrewAI with SurrealDB instead of their built-in memory?

Where does Agent Memory keep its state?

THE PLATFORM

Everything an application and its agents know. Five surfaces, one engine.

Database

Document, graph, vector, time-series and relational in one engine.

Five data models as dotted tiles: documents, graph, vector, time-series and relational

Agent Memory

What an agent learns, with its source and its time, in the same engine.

A timeline of remembered facts, each with its source

Cloud

Dedicated clusters by region, or serverless on SurrealDB Earth.

Clusters in three regions on a world map, each running or scaling

Studio

Query, explore and design the schema from the browser.

MCP

Every model that speaks MCP reaches the database and the memory directly.

Three models connected through MCP to the database and Agent Memory

IN PRODUCTION

Trusted at scale. Samsung, Nvidia, Verizon, Tencent, and Walmart run on SurrealDB.

14,000+

Developers building on SurrealDB Cloud

4M+

Developers building on SurrealDB worldwide

FROM THE TEAMS

SurrealDB gives us a foundation where we can unify semantic search, knowledge graphs, and AI-driven decision making without stitching together multiple systems. Collapsing responsibility into SurrealDB has become our default engineering posture.

Justin Foley

VP of Engineering, Later

GET STARTED

Memory on the database. Agent Memory writes facts, vectors and their history in one SurrealDB transaction, with every answer traceable to its source.

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