claude-mem has 116,434 GitHub stars. palace-rs has 10.
I compared what each one actually ships, using only their own READMEs and source:
claude-mem: Node + Bun + uv/Python + Chroma + an HTTP worker. An LLM (Claude Haiku by default) writes your memories. Telemetry on by default. No published retrieval benchmark.
palace-rs: one Rust binary, one SQLite file. Stores what happened verbatim, no LLM, zero tokens to write. No telemetry. LongMemEval R
@5 0.987, reproducible.
Stars tell you what people clicked. Not what you have to run.
Full fact-by-fact breakdown below 👇