1. Create an account
Go to platform.cognee.ai and continue with Google, GitHub, or an email and password (at least 8 characters). A social provider is used for identity only; an email sign-up has to be confirmed through the link sent to your inbox before you can sign in. On your first sign-in a Personal Workspace is created for you — there is no naming step, and the welcome screen appears while it finishes provisioning in the background. Uploaded data lands in itsdefault_dataset. You can create further workspaces later, and those you name yourself.
Forgot your password? The Forgot password? link on the sign-in page emails a reset link; repeated attempts are rate-limited.Sign-ups are sometimes capped. When they are, a new account lands on We’re at capacity with Sign out as the only action — you are on the waitlist and are emailed when a place frees up.
2. Choose how to start
Brand-new users land on a Welcome to Cognee Cloud splash — Let’s take a minute to set up your account. Get started → opens onboarding, which asks How do you want to start? and offers three paths. You can skip it with Set up later and replay it from the start at any time from the ? menu in the top bar.Claude Code
Use Cognee as your agent’s memory layer.
Codex
The same, for Codex.
Company Dataset
Upload your own data and search it.
Connect an agent
1
Open a terminal
Run the setup in your own shell — not inside Claude Code. Use the Mac / Windows toggle at the top right of the panel to get PowerShell commands instead of bash; see Mac / Windows for what it rewrites.
2
Paste the block onboarding gives you
It writes
COGNEE_BASE_URL and COGNEE_API_KEY to ~/.cognee/.env — the file both plugins read at session start — and registers and installs the plugin in the same paste. Because the credentials live in a file rather than the shell environment, they survive closing the terminal, and re-running the block replaces them instead of stacking duplicates.3
Start your agent
Run
claude (or codex). Claude Code shows Cognee in its status bar; Codex connects memory from here automatically. Continue is always enabled — onboarding does not wait to detect the agent.4
Inspect the session
Send your agent a message or two, then open Sessions in the sidebar: that conversation is listed there, with the observations, tool calls, tokens, and cost it produced. Seeing it is how you confirm the plugin is really writing to your memory. From there the session is distilled into your knowledge graph, which is what makes the next conversation able to recall it.
Agent not recalling anything? Check that
~/.cognee/.env exists with both variables and that you started the agent after writing it. Then see the Claude Code or Codex plugin guide.Upload your data
1
Connect your data
Drag files into the drop zone, browse for them, or paste text directly. PDF, CSV, TXT, Markdown, and JSON are supported.
2
Let it build
Setting up workspace → Uploading files → Building knowledge graph, which is the
cognify pipeline. How long it takes depends on how much you uploaded.3
Ask a question
Enter a natural language query and Cognee answers from the graph — the same mechanism as
recall.3. Create an API key
API keys authenticate the Cloud SDK, the REST API, and agent connections. Open API Keys in the sidebar, click Create new key, name it, and copy it — it is shown only once.Next steps
Workspace Overview
Your workspace at a glance.
Company Brain
Connect Slack, GitHub, or Google Drive.
Cloud SDK
Drive Cognee Cloud from Python.
Cloud functionality
The full API surface.