About Memos
Memos is a personal timeline for quick notes that you host yourself. The idea is to write first and organize later: you save a thought in Markdown without choosing a title or folder, optionally attach images and files, and it lands on a chronological feed.
Finding things again relies on search, tag filters and a view of any given day on the timeline. You can pin important memos and save frequently used filters as views. New memos are private, and you decide per memo whether to keep it to yourself, show it to signed-in users or invite specific people, or make it public with a link. The project advertises zero telemetry and a full export of your data.
Memos is MIT licensed and built with Go on the back end, React on the front end and SQLite for storage. The quickest way to run it is a Docker container, with other options in the deployment guide, and there is a live demo to try first. Releases follow a year-and-month version scheme.
Key features
- Markdown notes with images and file attachments
- Chronological timeline of memos
- Search, tag filters and saved views
- Per-memo visibility controls
- Pinned memos for important notes
- Full data export with zero telemetry
Good fit for
- →Personal journal or microblog on your own server
- →Capturing quick thoughts without organizing them
- →Sharing selected notes with a link
- Tags
- notes
- memo
- markdown
- self-hosted
- timeline
- microblog
- privacy
- sqlite
Memos: questions and answers
- What is Memos used for?
- Memos is a self-hosted, Markdown-based notes timeline for capturing quick thoughts, private by default, with search, tags, pinned memos and per-note visibility. It is a good fit for personal journal or microblog on your own server, capturing quick thoughts without organizing them and sharing selected notes with a link.
- Is Memos open source?
- Yes. Memos is open source under the MIT licence. Its source code is on GitHub at usememos/memos and is written mainly in Go.
- Is Memos free?
- Yes. Memos is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
- Can I self-host Memos?
- Yes. Memos can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure; there is no official hosted version.
- What is Memos an alternative to?
- Memos is an open-source alternative to Google Keep, Evernote, Apple Notes and Zoho Notebook. Other open-source alternatives to Google Keep include Simplenote, Standard Notes and Notesnook.
- Is Memos actively maintained?
- Yes. The most recent commit to Memos was on 2 October 2026, and the latest release is v0.31.0, published on 19 September 2026. The project has 63k stars on GitHub.
Open-source alternatives to Memos
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SaaS alternatives to Memos
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Google Keep
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Lightweight notes, checklists and reminders synced with Google accounts
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Evernote
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Evernote is a note-taking app for capturing notes, documents and web clippings and keeping them organized and searchable across devices.
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Apple Notes
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Built-in Apple notes app with folders, checklists, document scanning and iCloud sync
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Zoho Notebook
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Notebook app with note cards, voice notes and document scanning
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Drafts
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Quick-capture text app for Apple devices with actions to send notes elsewhere
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UpNote
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Notes app with notebooks, tags and sync across mobile and desktop
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