Personal KB vs team KB.
> Everyone's building a personal knowledge base. The team problem is the hard one.
Obsidian, Notion, Claude, ChatGPT. For one person, it looks clean and works great. Then you try to do the same for a team.
A personal knowledge base is a solved problem.
For one person, the tools are everywhere and they're good. Notes sync, search works, your AI can read them. The personal knowledge base is the TodoMVC of AI apps. Everyone has built one.
What does a team knowledge base need that a personal one doesn't?
The moment more than one person. Or one agent. Shares a knowledge base, a whole iceberg appears below the waterline. This is where most personal-KB tools quietly fall apart.
How Basic Memory handles the team layer.
We built the below-the-waterline part. Each team need, and what Basic Memory does about it:
| Team need | Basic Memory |
|---|---|
| Permissions & access control | Owner, editor, and viewer roles, plus per-project visibility (standard, shared, or private). |
| Conflict resolution | Real-time collaborative editing built on CRDTs (Yjs). Every keystroke syncs, no merge conflicts. |
| Onboarding | New people and agents read the team's shared knowledge graph on day one. No tribal knowledge handoff. |
| Accountability & audit | Audit logs for account and access activity, plus a new version on every save you can restore. |
| Search at scale | Full-text, semantic, and knowledge-graph search across every project. Not grep over a folder. |
| Trusted vs. noise | A curated knowledge graph you own and structure with schemas. Not an opaque pile of chat logs. |
| SSO & compliance | Entra SSO and TOTP for partner and enterprise deployments, with conditional access policies. |
| Isolation & privacy | Per-tenant isolation. Each organization gets its own database and file storage, no shared tenancy. |
What we don't do (yet): Basic Memory doesn't auto-ingest from Slack, Jira, or Drive, and it doesn't run automated staleness or content-gap detection. You bring knowledge in and curate it. We'd rather be honest about the edges than overclaim.
Skills teach every agent how to use it.
A shared knowledge base only works if agents use it consistently. Basic Memory ships Agent Skills. Pre-built instructions that teach Claude and any agent how to capture, recall, curate, and structure knowledge the same way every time. Drop them in and your whole team's agents work to the same playbook.
memory-capturememory-continuememory-curatememory-researchmemory-tasksmemory-schema
Browse the skills →The team layer, built in.
One shared knowledge graph for your people and their AI agents. with roles, audit, and isolation. Plain Markdown you own.