RE-call vs Mem0: No-LLM memory system trades accuracy for cost and privacy

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Developer benchmarks comparing RE-call, an open-source memory system that never calls an LLM, against Mem0 show Mem0 outperforms RE-call on temporal reasoning tasks, scoring 0.567 versus 0.408 on the BEAM benchmark. The gap exists because Mem0 distills memories into clean summaries at ingest using an LLM, while RE-call stores raw conversation turns, causing date-related queries to retrieve wrong instances of the same fact. However, RE-call's no-LLM design means zero ingest cost compared to Mem0's $7.29 and 2.6 million tokens spent processing the same workload. RE-call also completed ingestion in 67 seconds versus Mem0's 288 seconds, and keeps all data within the user's own database. The author concludes that neither system is universally better — the right choice depends on whether a user prioritises accuracy on time-sensitive queries or prefers lower cost, faster ingest, and local data control.

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