Claude Memory: The 10 Best Ways to Give Claude Persistent Memory (2026)

Claude memory, compared. This guide covers every practical way to give Claude, Claude Code and Claude Desktop persistent, long-term memory across sessions: memory MCP servers, Claude Code plugins, CLAUDE.md, and Anthropic's built-in memory. Each entry has what it stores, where the memory lives, how to install it, and who it's for.

Last updated: November 2026.

Contents

• Quick comparison
• ⭐ 1. Glen: shared Claude memory for your whole team
• 2. Claude Code built-in memory (CLAUDE.md and auto memory)
• 3. Claude app memory (claude.ai, Desktop, mobile)
• 4. claude-mem
• 5. Mem0
• 6. Supermemory
• 7. Basic Memory
• 8. MCP Knowledge Graph Memory Server (official reference)
• 9. Cognee
• 10. Graphiti and Zep
• Honorable mentions
• How to choose a Claude memory tool
• Claude memory FAQ

Quick comparison

⭐ 1. Glen: shared Claude memory for your whole team

⭐ Top pick for Claude Code memory ⭐

[!TIP] Most Claude memory tools remember for one person. Glen remembers for the whole team. Every Claude Code session your teammates run is recorded, turned into memory, and fed back into your Claude while it works. If someone already figured out why the billing worker batches at 500, your Claude knows before you ask.

npx @tryglen/cli@latest install

Glen is shared memory for coding agents. It records the agent sessions on your team (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Pi and your own agents) and the tools you connect, such as Slack, GitHub, tickets, docs and meeting recorders (Fireflies, Fathom, Granola). From that it builds observations about people, projects and decisions, and puts the relevant ones into Claude's context on every turn.

Most Claude memory tools stop at "Claude remembers what I told it last week." Glen covers what the person at the next desk told their Claude last week, which is where most of a team's lost context is.

What Glen gives Claude:

• Team-wide recall. glen search "<question>" returns what anyone in the org worked out, with the session it came from. Glen also injects relevant context automatically, so Claude doesn't have to know to ask.
• Code to conversation tracing. glen code-search <path:start-end> follows git blame back to the agent conversation that wrote those lines, so Claude gets the reasoning behind a change, not only the diff.
• Memory that drops stale decisions. When a newer decision contradicts an older one, the older one stops being recalled.
• Access control at recall. Each memory is checked per person, so Claude only sees what its user is already allowed to see.
• Shared skills, transcripts and artifacts. A team skill library, a searchable transcript hub, session takeover (move a live session to another agent mid-task), and a library of saved reports and runbooks.
• A remote MCP server (OAuth) and a CLI that reach the same memory, so Claude Desktop, Claude Code and any other MCP client all see the same thing.
• Private and silent modes. glen incognito keeps a session out of memory; glen silent records but surfaces nothing.

Measured result: in Glen's benchmark replaying 100 merged PRs, Codex with Glen merged 21% faster and used 29% fewer tokens per task (details on tryglen.com).

Install for Claude Code:

npx @tryglen/cli@latest install

The installer detects Claude Code (and Codex, Cursor and Pi), installs the plugin and hooks, and signs you in. Then invite teammates:

glen invite teammate@company.com

Pricing: free for up to 3 people and 15,000 memories, no credit card. Paid Personal and Team plans add integrations and higher limits.

Choose Glen if: more than one person on your team uses Claude Code (or Codex or Cursor), and you're tired of agents relearning what a teammate's agent already worked out.

⭐ Try Glen free at tryglen.com →

2. Claude Code built-in memory (CLAUDE.md and auto memory)

Every Claude Code session starts with a fresh context window, and Claude Code ships two ways to carry knowledge between them.

• CLAUDE.md holds instructions you write. It loads at the start of every session, at several scopes: ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md for you across all projects, ./CLAUDE.md or ./.claude/CLAUDE.md for a project (committed, so your team shares it), plus organization-managed files. You can split it up with @path/to/file imports and .claude/rules/. Claude Code also reads AGENTS.md.
• Auto memory holds notes Claude writes itself from your corrections and preferences. It's on by default in local sessions, scoped per repository, and the first 200 lines (or 25KB) load each session. Toggle it in /memory, or set "autoMemoryEnabled": false in a project's settings.

Strengths: free, no setup, plain files you can review in a PR. Limits: CLAUDE.md is hand-maintained and goes stale; auto memory is local to one machine and one person. Neither captures what happened in your teammates' sessions. Docs: How Claude remembers your project

3. Claude app memory (claude.ai, Desktop, mobile)

The Claude apps can remember context from your past chats and search previous conversations when you ask. It's on by default for Free, Pro and Max on web, Desktop and mobile; on Team and Enterprise an owner turns it on. You can view, edit or turn it off in Settings, and incognito chats aren't remembered.

Strengths: zero setup for everyday chat. Limits: lives in the Claude app only. It doesn't reach Claude Code, the API, or other agents, and it's per person. Docs: Claude's memory (Anthropic support)

4. claude-mem

A Claude Code plugin that hooks into session lifecycle events, captures what the agent does, compresses it into summaries with an LLM, and injects relevant context into later sessions. Memory lives in ~/.claude-mem on your machine, with cloud sync opt-in. It also supports Codex, Gemini, Copilot, OpenCode and others.

npx claude-mem install

Strengths: automatic capture, large community, local by default. Limits: single user. Summarization runs on your Anthropic plan, your own key, or its paid observer. Repo: thedotmack/claude-mem

5. Mem0

Mem0 is memory infrastructure for agents you build: an open-source library (pip install mem0ai / npm install mem0ai), a self-hostable server, and a hosted platform. A CLI lets coding agents like Claude Code sign up and use it directly.

npm install -g @mem0/cli
mem0 init --agent --agent-caller claude-code

Strengths: mature SDKs in Python and TypeScript, hosted or self-hosted. Limits: aimed more at developers adding memory to their own product than at a team's coding history. Repo: mem0ai/mem0

6. Supermemory

A memory API with a hosted remote MCP server, so one account gives Claude Desktop, Claude Code and other MCP clients the same memory. It can also run fully locally.

claude mcp add --transport http supermemory https://mcp.supermemory.ai/mcp

Strengths: OAuth sign-in, works across many clients, team spaces. Limits: captures what you or your agent choose to save, rather than recording sessions. Repo: supermemoryai/supermemory

7. Basic Memory

Stores Claude's memory as plain Markdown files on your disk, which you can open, edit and version in git or Obsidian. Runs as a local MCP server, with an optional cloud version.

claude mcp add basic-memory -- uvx --prerelease=allow basic-memory mcp

Strengths: human-readable, local-first, you ow