AI brains landscape · snapshot September 2026

AI brain providers, compared.

A working map of AI brain tools sorted by what you need them to do: keep a personal brain, remember people, understand company knowledge, answer from documents, run workflows, or give employees an approved assistant where they already work.

Start with the job

What do you need AI to do?

Use cases first, plumbing second. Pick a need state to understand the category, then use the full provider comparison below for the details.

Provider	Use-case category	Segment	Principal use case	Tags	Open?	SaaS?	Pricing	Memory model	Freshness

Activity note — audited Sep. 21, 2026: all 30 GitHub-linked projects had a push in the previous three months (the oldest was 75 days). GitHub stars and push dates are shown on each GitHub row. One outdated NeoCortex product URL returned 404, so this page now links to its maintained repository and docs instead. Perplexity’s canonical Brain article is bot-protected from simple requests but was verified separately. Recheck pricing, security, and product maturity before buying or publishing procurement guidance.

Thesis: the useful split is shared company memory (“what does the organization know?”) versus agent-specific adaptive memory (“what has this AI worker learned from doing the job?”). Serious systems eventually need both, plus governance.

How to read this landscape

Use cases first, labels second.

This page is a public snapshot, not procurement advice. The most useful question is not “which category is canonical?” but “what job do you need the brain to do?” Use the comparison as a starting map, then recheck pricing, security, and product maturity before making a buying decision.

Start with the jobPersonal memory, company knowledge, document research, agent workflow, or approved employee assistant.

Separate product from plumbingSome entries are buyer-facing apps; others are developer infrastructure that a brain may be built on.

Check the memory modelUser preferences, agent experience, document context, temporal events, and company knowledge behave differently.

Look for transactive memoryThe strongest company brains help people and agents know who knows what, where the authoritative source lives, and which context matters for the task.

Verify governance earlyPermissions, provenance, audit logs, retention, deletion, and memory-poisoning defenses matter before rollout.

Treat market signals as directionalGitHub stars, public pricing, funding, and customer claims change quickly and should be rechecked.

Current thesis

The winner probably needs two kinds of memory.

Shared company memory answers: what does the organization know across docs, customers, workflows, decisions, tools, and people?

Transactive memory answers: who or what knows this, where is the authoritative version, and how should the right context be retrieved before work starts?

Agent-specific adaptive memory answers: what has this AI worker learned from doing its job for this customer, team, or process?

The serious product will need both, plus governance. Otherwise you either get a smart search box that never learns from work, or a learning agent with no trustworthy company context.