Kiomi or Vilix AI: Shared Memory Extension or Hosted Memory Layer, Honestly Compared

You explain your project to ChatGPT on Monday, switch to Claude on Tuesday to draft the plan, and by Wednesday you are typing the same background into Gemini because none of them can see what you told the others. Every AI assistant keeps its own memory, inside its own walls. The question is not whether that is annoying. The question is what kind of fix actually fits the way you work.

Two tools answer that question from opposite directions. Kiomi Memory is a Chrome extension that carries your words between the chat apps in your browser. Vilix AI is a hosted memory layer that your tools connect to directly, over MCP. Both give you one memory across many AIs. They are built for different shapes of work, and picking the wrong shape is how you end up paying for a fix that does not reach the place where the forgetting happens.

What Kiomi does

Kiomi is a Chrome extension for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok. It watches what you say in those four chat apps and builds one shared memory from it. When you start a new chat, it finds the few memories relevant to what you are about to ask and adds them as a labeled block, so you can see exactly what was added. Memories come from your words. AI replies are uploaded too, but only for context; they are not treated as your words.

The design is deliberately careful about what it injects. Kiomi adds only the few most relevant memories and leaves out anything it is unsure about, on the principle that an unrelated memory throws the AI off more than a missing one. If you change your mind about something, the new memory replaces the old one instead of stacking up next to it. You can pause the extension at any time, turn it off for a single chat, and wipe everything from kiomi.ai.

It is in public beta, free during early access, with the first 50 spots open for now. It works in Chrome on desktop. Kiomi is upfront that it can miss things now and then, and that brought-in memories may not always be accurate. That is the honest cost of the extension shape: it works exactly where you browse, and it works by reading the page you are on.

There is also a cheaper version of part of this job, and Kiomi's own guide says so: keep a context prompt you paste yourself, or put the same note into each app's custom instructions. Both work, and both go stale, because every change means editing the note again in every place. The extension exists to remove that upkeep for the four chat apps it covers.

What Vilix AI does

Vilix AI takes the other side of the same problem. It is a cloud-hosted memory layer, so you manage zero infrastructure. Your AI tools connect to it directly over MCP, the open protocol, and call get_context to load relevant saved context and save_turn to store the exchange. Claude, Codex, Cursor, ChatGPT, OpenClaw, Hermes, and any MCP-compatible client can all read from the same memory and write back to it.

The difference is not only where the memory lives. It is what gets kept. Vilix AI keeps full conversation history, not just extracted facts, plus derived memories, tasks, and project rules. Retrieval is semantic, with keyword matching alongside it, so a later session finds the decision from last week even when you phrase the question differently. You can export everything or delete it at any time. The free plan is free forever, and the 7-day Pro trial needs no credit card.

That shape matters most the moment your work stops being a chat window. A scheduled agent that runs at 2 a.m. never opens a browser tab. A coding agent inside your editor never sees the extension. A phone app never loads it. Those tools can all call the same hosted layer over MCP, and the memory they read is the same memory your chat tools wrote.

The extension stops at the browser's edge

Here is where the comparison turns practical. If your whole AI life happens in four browser tabs, the extension covers it. You install it in minutes, nothing to operate, and you can watch exactly what it adds to each message. For the job of carrying your own words between ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok, it is the lightest possible fix.

But the moment an agent runs outside the browser, the extension has nothing to attach to. A nightly n8n workflow that triages support tickets wakes up with no memory of yesterday's tickets, no record of which customers already got an answer, and no way to learn from the run before it. A coding agent that picks up a half-finished feature has no access to the decisions from the last session. A scheduled report agent re-derives the same context every single run, because nobody briefed it and nothing persisted.

That is the gap a hosted layer is built for. The memory sits outside every tool, so every tool can reach it. Your chat apps write to it, your agents read from it before they act, and they write back when they finish, so the next run starts from where the last one stopped instead of from zero. The context that used to live only in a browser tab becomes shared state for everything you run.

Which job are you hiring for?

The choice comes down to where your work actually happens.

If your pain is "the next chat does not know what I told the last one," and your work happens in the browser, in ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Grok, you want the extension. It is fast to install, free while it is in early access, and it shows its work in every message. Kiomi is built exactly for that.

If your pain is "my agents redo work, forget last week's decisions, and start every session at zero," including the coding agents and scheduled runs that never open a browser tab, you want the layer. Memory your agents read before they act and write when they finish, shared across every tool without you pasting anything, is what a hosted MCP layer is for.

They are not substitutes, and they stack cleanly. The extension carries your own words between chat apps. The layer carries your work state between everything else, including the agents that run while you sleep. The honest version of the choice is about where your work actually happens. If it all happens in four browser tabs, the extension is enough. The moment an agent runs outside the browser, it needs the layer, and that layer is what Vilix AI is built to be.