Memos vs Obsidian
Memos and Obsidian are both note-taking software. Memos is open source under MIT, with 64k GitHub stars. Obsidian is a commercial product from Dynalist Inc.
Which to pick
- Pick Memos when
- You want a quick place to jot thoughts and links on your own server.
- Pick Obsidian when
- You want notes as plain files you own, work offline, and are happy to tune your setup with plugins.
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 note-taking app that stores notes as Markdown files in a local folder, with linking, a graph view and a large plugin ecosystem.
Designed for short notes, not long documents or structured knowledge bases.
Closed source, sync and publishing are paid add-ons, and team collaboration is weak.
Production-ready (both)
Self-hosted server
Desktop app and mobile app
Go, TypeScript, React, SQLite and PostgreSQL
Electron and Markdown
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Closed source, sold by Dynalist Inc.
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
6.2k 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.