| FMRS | 40 / 100 · D | 74 / 100 · B | 72 / 100 · B |
| Reliability | 8 / 20 | 11 / 20 | 10 / 20 |
|---|
| Security and permissions | 6 / 20 | 15 / 20 | 15 / 20 |
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| Maintenance | 9 / 20 | 17 / 20 | 16 / 20 |
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| Documentation | 9 / 20 | 17 / 20 | 17 / 20 |
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| Setup experience | 8 / 20 | 14 / 20 | 14 / 20 |
| Best for | - Local-first RAG scenarios without mandatory cloud dependencies
- Question answering systems requiring high-quality citations
- Research or document analysis involving figures and vision QA
- Developers who want flexibility in choosing embedding and reranking providers
| - Developers needing quick, API-key-free web search capabilities
- Privacy-conscious users who prefer local search execution
- AI application development with Claude Desktop or Claude Code
| - Privacy-conscious developers who want local data storage.
- Researchers who need AI-assisted management of large note collections.
- Users of Markdown editors like Obsidian.
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| Not for | - Fully cloud-hosted large-scale production environments (though cloud storage is supported, it's primarily local-first)
- Simple keyword search without document structure or images
- Enterprise users requiring official support or commercial assurance (the project is MIT-licensed community project)
| - Enterprise applications requiring high-scale, reliable search APIs
- Users needing advanced search features like custom ranking or filters
- Accessing sites blocked by TLS fingerprinting without installing the optional browser backend
| - Users needing cloud sync and mobile access (unless using the paid cloud service).
- Minimalists who want zero configuration.
- Scenarios requiring large-scale vector databases and complex retrieval (local SQLite may be insufficient).
|
| Required permissions | - File system access: reading and indexing local documents
- Network access: fetching documents from HTTP, S3, etc., and calling embedding/QA provider APIs
- Local code execution: analysis capability uses sandboxed Python execution, so this may pose security risks
| - Outbound network access to DuckDuckGo and other websites
- Reads environment variables for SafeSearch, region, and CA certificates
- Optionally reads a CA certificate file (for TLS-intercepting proxies)
| - Read and write to the local filesystem (default: ~/basic-memory).
- Perform file and directory operations (create, edit, delete).
- Access local SQLite database (or Postgres/Milvus if configured).
|
| Risks and side effects | - Sandboxed code execution may have security risks; ensure inputs are trusted
- External API calls (embedding, QA) may incur costs
- Local database and data need proper backups to avoid loss
- The server is not officially maintained, so compatibility or stability issues may arise
| - Search endpoints may occasionally return empty results or errors, especially when blocked
- Content fetching may be subject to SSRF protection, blocking private or loopback addresses by default
- Misuse could lead to rate limiting or IP blocking
| - Tools have write operations that may unintentionally modify or delete notes.
- Edit operations may overwrite existing content, though there are protections.
- Semantic search and reranking features may require model downloads, adding latency.
- Local data backups are the user's responsibility.
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| Supported clients | Claude Desktop | Claude Desktop, Claude Code | Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, VS Code, ChatGPT, Obsidian |
| Tools | 4 | 2 | 21 |