The one-line version
Claude Mem remembers what the agent did. Deiko remembers what you asked for, and what came of it. One watches the agent work. The other starts with you pointing at the screen and talking.
Where Claude Mem is the better tool
- You want memory with zero effort. Claude Mem hooks into the agent’s session and records the tools it calls and what they returned, then compresses that into notes for next time. You don’t change how you work at all.
- You want the agent’s full trail. Which files it read, what it ran, what it learned along the way. Deiko keeps a short report per brief, not a log of every step.
- You type your prompts. If you never point at a screen, Deiko’s capture half does nothing for you, and Claude Mem fits your day better.
- You’re not on a Mac. Deiko is macOS only.
Where Deiko is the better tool
- The context starts with you. A tool log knows the agent edited
PriceCard.tsx. It doesn’t know you circled the card and said “I saved $79 and it still says $99”. Deiko keeps that: your words, the crop, the page you were on. - Memory is per piece of work, not per session. Every brief is filed into the task it continues, so “that price bug’s back” on Friday lands with Tuesday’s work, and Friday’s agent is told what was done, decided and left open.
- You switch agents. Claude Code on Tuesday, Cursor on Friday, ChatGPT in the browser on Saturday. The task note rides inside the brief, so every one of them gets it.
- You want to see and steer it. Every task sits on a board on your Mac. Move a brief, answer “Same work?”, edit or forget a note, and the next agent gets your version.
The honest overlap
Both run a local memory server your agent can search over MCP, and both keep what they remember on your machine. They also stack well: Claude Mem for the agent’s own trail, Deiko for what you asked and where each piece of work stands. If you only want one and you mostly type, start with Claude Mem. If you think out loud while looking at the bug, that’s what Deiko is for.
Weighing more options, like CLAUDE.md or --resume? Here are five ways to give Claude Code a memory between sessions.
Practical differences
- How memory gets in. Claude Mem: automatically, from the agent’s session hooks. Deiko: from your briefs, plus a short report the agent saves when it finishes one. In Claude Code, a Stop hook makes sure it does.
- Platform. Deiko is macOS 14 or later, Apple Silicon only.
- Account. Deiko has none. No email, no password, no profile.
- Source. Both are open source. Deiko is MIT, the relay included: read it on GitHub.
- Price. Deiko is free, no account, no card. Every Mac gets two hours of hosted transcription a month; past that it transcribes on-device, and your own Groq key has no limit. Pro is $6.99 a month, $69 a year or $169 once, for ten hours.