Smara vs Vilix AI: picking a shared memory layer for your AI tools

You have got three AI tools that each forget everything overnight, and you are done re-briefing them. Two names keep coming up: Smara and Vilix AI. Both promise one shared memory across your tools. They are not the same product, and the right choice depends on three questions most comparisons skip. Here is the honest breakdown.

The one-paragraph version of each

Smara is a memory API with opinions about how memory should work. You store discrete facts through a REST API, Python SDKs, or an MCP server; retrieval blends semantic similarity with a forgetting curve, so recent and reinforced memories outrank stale ones. It catches contradictions at write time. It is MIT-licensed, so you can self-host the whole thing with Docker if you want. Pricing is quantified down to the memory: 10,000 free, 200,000 for $19/mo, 2,000,000 for $99/mo.

Vilix AI is a hosted memory and work-state layer for people who live across many AI tools. It stores full conversation exchanges, not just extracted facts, plus projects, tasks, rules, and reusable agent skills. You connect each tool once (OAuth or an API key against https://api.vilix.ai/mcp), including headless agents like Hermes and OpenClaw that run while you sleep. Plans: free tier, Starter $10/mo, Pro $20/mo, Power $49/mo, with a 7-day Pro trial and no credit card. The catch, stated upfront: it is cloud-only. There is no self-host option.

Question 1: Does it have to run on your hardware?

This one decides more comparisons than any feature table. If your answer is yes, for compliance, paranoia, or principle, the conversation is over: Smara ships a Docker Compose setup (Postgres with pgvector plus a Voyage AI key for embeddings) under an MIT license. Vilix AI cannot meet that requirement at any price.

Be honest with yourself about the cost, though. Self-hosting a memory store is real operations work: database upgrades, embedding key management, backups. Smara's hosted Developer tier is $19/mo. Unless the requirement is genuinely hard, most people should price their own ops time before romanticizing the Docker route.

If the cloud is fine, Vilix AI's counterweight is portability without the ops burden: export everything in a portable format whenever you want, delete single memories or wipe the account instantly, per-user data isolation, no training third-party models on your memory. Not the same as self-hosting, but it answers the lock-in worry.

Question 2: Facts or full conversations?

This is the real philosophical split, and it matters more than it sounds.

Smara stores facts. Their own API examples show the shape: a fact field, an importance score, a source label. Retrieval finds the right facts and ranks them by relevance times decay. Clean, compact, cheap to query.

Vilix AI stores full exchanges. The actual conversation, with source metadata, plus derived memories on top. When a decision from three weeks ago matters, the reasoning and the dead ends are still there, not just the distilled conclusion.

Which is better? It depends what you lose sleep over. If your pain is "my agent keeps forgetting my preferences and project conventions," facts are enough and Smara's decay scoring is genuinely clever: unreinforced trivia fades instead of clogging retrieval. If your pain is "we decided something in a long debugging session and now nobody remembers why," you want the transcript, and that is Vilix AI's bet.

One related difference: Smara detects contradictions when you write ("replaced" when a new fact contradicts an old one). Vilix AI handles it with public last-write-wins semantics plus recency-aware retrieval: correct something once and every tool sees the update. Different mechanisms, same goal. Neither is magic; both beat a junk drawer of stale context.

Question 3: How many tools, and do any of them run without you?

Count your tools honestly, including the ones that run on schedules.

Smara's native MCP integrations cover Claude Code, Cursor, and Windsurf, with CrewAI and LangChain via Python SDKs and Codex through the REST API. If you are a developer whose world is those tools, or you are building an agent product and want memory as an API primitive, the fit is natural.

Vilix AI's list is wider and weirder: Claude, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, Hermes, Grok, Manus AI, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, Lovable, Muse, anything MCP-compatible. The interesting part for operators is the headless agents. A nightly n8n-style research run or a Hermes background task writes to the same memory your interactive sessions read. If your setup includes agents that run while you are asleep, that shared loop is the whole point, and it is the thing Smara does not try to be.

Each Vilix AI client needs its own one-time setup, which is mildly annoying when you have six tools. Smara's cloud path is an API key plus the MCP package, which their docs put at about thirty seconds for Claude Code. Neither is hard; neither is zero.

The pricing math, without the marketing

Smara meters memories. Vilix AI sells plan tiers. So "which is cheaper" depends on your shape:

• Light individual use: both have free tiers. Smara's is quantified (10,000 memories, no credit card), which I respect. Vilix AI's is "limited" without a published number, which is vaguer than it should be.
• Paid entry: Vilix AI Starter at $10/mo undercuts Smara Developer at $19/mo, but they are not the same unit, so compare against your actual usage instead of the sticker.
• Teams: Smara includes teams from the free tier (3 members) up through Pro. Vilix AI is built around one user's memory across their tools; shared team memory is not its model. If you are buying for a team on day one, that is a real point for Smara.

What I would actually do

Run both free tiers for a week against your real workflow. Connect the two or three tools you actually use daily, plus one scheduled thing if you have it. Then ask: which one did I stop thinking about? The best memory layer is the one that disappears.

And verify everything above against the primary sources before you pay anyone: smara.io and the smara-io/smara GitHub README for their side, vilix.ai for the other. Prices move, features ship, and a comparison page is a snapshot, not a contract. This one included, and yes, it is written by someone who builds Vilix AI, which is exactly why the tradeoffs are stated plainly instead of buried.