Memos vs Notion
Memos and Notion are both note-taking software. Memos is open source under MIT, with 64k GitHub stars. Notion is a commercial product from Notion Labs.
Which to pick
- Pick Memos when
- You want a quick place to jot thoughts and links on your own server.
- Pick Notion when
- A small or mid-size team wants one flexible tool for docs, wiki and light project tracking.
Side by side
A self-hosted note app that shows short Markdown notes in a timeline, like a private microblog, with tags and sharing.
A workspace of pages and databases for notes, wikis, project tracking and docs, with AI search and agents built in.
Designed for short notes, not long documents or structured knowledge bases.
Cloud only, slow on large workspaces, offline support is limited, and its flexibility leads to messy structures.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server
Cloud service, desktop app and mobile app
Go, TypeScript, React, SQLite and PostgreSQL
Not published
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Closed source, sold by Notion Labs
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
64k GitHub stars
4.1k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 4 years ago, latest release 26.11.0.
Not known
Other comparisons
More note-taking apps
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.