Beacon vs debate.tellodb

Beacon and debate.tellodb are both inference engines & infra tracked by AIDiveForge. Below is a side-by-side comparison of pricing, capabilities, platforms, and ownership — sourced from each tool's live website and verified before publishing.

Beacon

Beacon is an open-source endpoint telemetry layer that runs locally alongside AI agents, capturing prompts, tool calls, file modifications, and approval workflows before any of that activity disappears into the void. It normalizes that telemetry and forwards it to SIEM platforms like Wazuh, Elastic, or Splunk, so security teams can apply the same detection logic they already run against the rest of the fleet. The architecture is self-hosted by design — no data leaves the endpoint unless you route it there yourself. The project is early-stage; the plugin ecosystem covers the major local agent harnesses but gaps exist for less common runtimes. Teams with agents not yet on the supported list write custom collector plugins — which means more surface area to maintain.

debate.tellodb

The core mechanism is fact supersession: when a user moves from NYC to SF, TelloDB marks the old location as stale and filters it from active agent context — so the LLM never hallucinates a two-year-old truth. A hybrid HNSW vector plus BM25 search index handles recall, while a separate Metric Vault layer resolves numeric queries deterministically before they ever reach the LLM. The vendor reports p99 retrieval at 4.2ms and benchmarks recall precision above 95% on LongMemEval-S against 68% for standard RAG. The engine ships as a single Rust binary, self-hostable or deployable on the vendor's platform. At v0.1.0, the surface area is narrow — this is a memory layer, not a full agent runtime.

Attribute	Beacon	debate.tellodb
Pricing	Free	Paid
Free trial	No	No
Open source	Yes	No
Has API	No	Yes
Self-hosted option	Yes	Yes
Platforms	Linux, macOS, Windows	Self-hosted binary, platform deployment
Pros	Runs entirely on the local endpoint with no external data forwarding required, so organizations in regulated industries can capture AI agent telemetry without breaching data residency requirements. Normalizes agent activity into structured telemetry compatible with Wazuh, Elastic, and Splunk, so security teams can write detection rules against AI agent behavior using the same tooling they already maintain for the rest of the infrastructure. Captures the full activity chain — prompts, tool calls, file edits, approval workflows — which means audit trails hold up when a compliance team asks exactly what an agent touched and when, rather than reconstructing context after the fact. MIT-licensed and free with no paid tier, so there is no licensing negotiation before a regulated-industry proof of concept, and the full source is auditable by the security team before deployment. Structured for MDM-managed deployments, so enterprise IT teams can push Beacon alongside agent runtimes through existing device management pipelines rather than requiring manual per-machine setup.	Fact supersession automatically marks prior user states as stale when contradicted by new input, so your agent stops confidently telling a user their old address is current. Deterministic aggregation in the Metric Vault resolves count and numeric queries before the LLM sees them, which means you stop relying on the model to do arithmetic over memory and stop getting wrong counts. Hybrid HNSW vector plus BM25 search runs in a single Rust binary, so you avoid stitching together a vector store and a keyword search service as separate infrastructure dependencies. Self-host path with an air-gapped proxy gateway option, so teams with data residency requirements can run the memory layer inside their own perimeter without routing user data through a third-party hosted service. Distillation pipeline extracts structured facts from raw conversational text rather than storing full transcripts, which means context windows stay narrow and you are not paying to re-embed every filler word.
Cons	Plugin coverage is scoped to the major local agent harnesses the project explicitly supports; agents running on runtimes outside that list produce no telemetry until a custom collector plugin is written and maintained — which delays security coverage for any team adopting a newer or less common agent framework. There is no hosted dashboard or managed backend, which means the security team owns the full stack: endpoint deployment, SIEM routing, schema mapping, and alert logic. Teams without an operational SIEM who want a turnkey monitoring UI will abandon Beacon for a hosted observability product before the first sprint ends. The project carries a small contributor base at the time of publication; teams depending on active maintenance for fast-moving agent runtimes accept the risk that plugin support lags runtime updates, requiring internal engineering to bridge the gap or switch to a vendor with a dedicated support contract.	TelloDB is a memory substrate only — it provides no agent task planning, tool-calling scaffolding, or workflow logic. Teams that need a full agent runtime will integrate TelloDB as a dependency inside a separate framework (LangGraph, CrewAI, or similar), which means owning the glue code and debugging across two systems when memory retrieval and task execution diverge. The project is at v0.1.0 with the open-source release flagged as new. The knowledge graph engine and temporal truth decay subsystems are advertised but lack the community-tested surface area of established memory stores. Teams building production agents that cannot tolerate evolving APIs will hit breaking changes before the interface stabilizes. Fact supersession logic is deterministic by design, which works cleanly for discrete facts like location or ownership — but nuanced preference evolution ("I mostly still like coffee but only in the mornings now") requires the application layer to model partial invalidation explicitly. Teams handling ambiguous or graduated state changes find themselves writing conflict-resolution logic that the engine does not provide out of the box, at which point simpler alternatives backed by relational stores start looking more tractable.

Bottom line

Beacon is free while debate.tellodb is paid; Beacon is open source; only debate.tellodb exposes a public API. Choose based on which difference matters most for your workflow.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between Beacon and debate.tellodb?

Beacon is Free and open source, while debate.tellodb is Paid. Compare pricing, free trial, API, platforms, and pros/cons in the table above on AIDiveForge.

Is Beacon better than debate.tellodb?

It depends on your workflow. Use the side-by-side attributes (pricing, open source, API, self-hosted, platforms) to decide. AIDiveForge does not rank a universal winner — we publish verified facts so you can choose.