Rafter, compared honestly

How to choose

The three alternatives are not really competitors to each other — they fail in different places, and which one you are outgrowing tells you whether Rafter is the answer yet. A rough decision rule:

• The knowledge belongs to one codebase.Keep it in the repo. A CLAUDE.md next to the code it describes is reviewed with that code and can never be stale in a way nobody notices.
• The knowledge belongs to one workstream, and one person works on it.A Claude Project is genuinely simpler. Rafter earns its place when a second person needs the same context, or a second tool does.
• The knowledge is written for people to read.Notion or a wiki is the right home. Prose written for humans is not the same artifact as an instruction an agent can follow.
• More than one person, more than one AI tool, and it outlives the chat.That is the case Rafter is built for — and the one where the alternatives all turn into copy-paste.

What the alternatives have in common

Every one of them is a store that a person reads and then re-pastes into a tool. That is the step that quietly breaks: the context reaches whichever teammate remembered to copy it, into whichever tool they happened to have open, in whatever state it was in that morning.

Rafter is read by the tool itself. It is an MCP server, so Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude Code and Codex query it directly — the same skills and memories, the same versions, for everyone, without anybody remembering to paste anything. That is the only real difference, and every comparison below is a variation on it.