Memos

What is Memos?

Memos is an open source, self-hosted note-taking app built around a private timeline of short notes. You type a quick note in Markdown, hit save, and it drops onto a chronological feed — a lightweight way to capture thoughts, daily logs, links, and snippets that live in your own database, not a company’s cloud.

What is Memos best for?

Memos is best for people who want the fast, jot-it-down feel of Google Keep but on infrastructure they control. It suits self-hosters, privacy-minded note-takers, and anyone building a personal log or “digital garden” who values quick capture and Markdown over folders, databases, and heavy formatting.

What can Memos do?

• Capture notes in Markdown with a timeline-first interface, file attachments, and links between memos
• Organize with #hashtags that appear in the sidebar as one-click filters, plus full-text search
• Save web pages, text, and images straight to your instance via the official Chrome/Firefox web clipper
• Integrate with anything through documented REST and gRPC APIs
• Run multi-user, with public/private note visibility per memo
• Self-host with Docker, a native binary, or Kubernetes, backed by SQLite, MySQL, or PostgreSQL

Is Memos free?

Yes — Memos is completely free and open source under the MIT license. There is no paid tier, no seat pricing, and no hosted cloud plan to upsell; the project explicitly states it’s “free because you host it.” Your only cost is the server it runs on, and it’s light enough for a Raspberry Pi or NAS.

Where does Memos fall short?

• It’s deliberately minimal. Organization is tag-based only — no nested notebooks, folders, or rich database views — so a large note collection can get hard to navigate compared to Notion or Evernote.
• There’s no official mobile app. You use the responsive web UI or a third-party client like Moe Memos (iOS/Android). These community apps are good, but they’re maintained separately from the core project.
• It’s built for quick personal capture, not team docs. If you need shared wikis, granular permissions, or long-form structured documents, an all-in-one workspace like AFFiNE or a dedicated knowledge base fits better.

What does Memos replace?

Memos is a self-hosted stand-in for Google Keep and, for simple note-taking, a lighter alternative to Evernote — it gives you the same quick-capture workflow without sending your notes to a third party. It also covers the fast-notes slice of Notion, though it deliberately skips Notion’s databases, wikis, and page hierarchy.

FAQ

Is Memos open source? Yes. Memos is fully open source under the permissive MIT license, with a Go backend and React frontend developed in the open on GitHub.

Can I self-host Memos for free? Yes. Self-hosting is the only way to run it, and the software is free — you pay only for your own server. It runs comfortably on low-power hardware like a Raspberry Pi.

Is Memos a good Google Keep alternative? For quick capture, yes — it mirrors Keep’s fast, timeline-style note-taking while keeping your data private and Markdown-native. If you rely on Keep’s tight Google account and Assistant integration, that’s the trade-off you give up.

What do I need to run Memos? A machine that can run Docker (or the native binary). SQLite works out of the box for a single instance; MySQL or PostgreSQL is optional for larger, multi-user setups.