Memos is a free, MIT-licensed self-hosted note-taking app that runs as a single ~20MB Go binary and gives you a Twitter-style Markdown timeline you fully own. It is the lightest serious option for capture-first journaling and dev TILs.
Memos is an open-source, self-hosted note-taking tool built around a Twitter-like timeline for fast Markdown capture, shipped as a single ~20MB Go binary. We rate it 83/100 — the best self-hosted choice for anyone who wants quick, dated, fully-owned micro-notes without the weight of Notion, Obsidian, or Joplin.
Memos was started in and is now maintained by the usememos organization. The main usememos/memos repo has crossed 59,100+ stars and 4,300+ forks, making it one of the most popular self-hosted productivity projects on GitHub. It is MIT-licensed and funded through GitHub Sponsors plus a small set of corporate sponsors (Warp, TestMu AI, SSD Nodes).
Where Notion, Obsidian, and Joplin assume you want folders and workspaces, Memos assumes the opposite: every note is a short Markdown post on a chronological timeline, tagged with hashtags and findable by full-text search. The result is a personal microblog — closer to a Twitter feed for one person than to a wiki — running on a server you control.
neosmemo/memos:stable); one docker run on port 5230 and you are online with SQLite by default.#tag, memo-to-memo references, instant full-text search, pinned memos, and visibility scopes (private, workspace, public).
On Reddit's r/selfhosted, Memos is one of the most consistently recommended apps when someone asks for a "self-hosted Twitter-style note-taker" or a lightweight Joplin alternative — top threads call out the small footprint, the speed of capture, and that it just works inside a single Docker container. The original Show HN thread picked up over 300 points, with commenters praising it as a refreshing alternative to bloated knowledge bases.
Independent reviewers echo the same picture. XDA-Developers called Memos their "new favorite" way to take notes after replacing Notion and Obsidian on a homelab; Peter Ries' blog and the xTom comparison of self-hosted note apps highlight how lightweight it feels next to Trilium or Outline. The recurring criticisms are equally consistent: Memos is intentionally narrow — there are no folders, no nested pages, and no graph view — so it is a poor fit for a multi-thousand-note second brain. A handful of GitHub issues also note that point releases occasionally ship breaking API changes that affect third-party clients, so production deployments should pin a specific version (e.g. neosmemo/memos:0.27).
Memos is completely free and open source. There is no paid plan, no cloud-hosted SaaS by the usememos team, and no telemetry. You only pay for the server you run it on.
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Self-hosted (only plan) | $0 forever | Unlimited memos and users, all features, full source under the MIT license. You provide the server. |
Optional running cost: a tiny VPS from a provider like SSD Nodes or Hetzner can host Memos comfortably from $3–5/month. There is no official Memos Cloud — for managed hosting the community usually recommends Coolify, Railway, or PikaPods.
Best for: Self-hosters, indie developers, and privacy-minded users who want a Twitter-style personal log on their own infrastructure. Particularly strong for daily journaling, link/quote capture, dev TILs, reading lists, and dated micro-updates inside a small team.
Not ideal for: Teams that need wiki-style nested pages and rich permissions (use Outline or Notion), users who want a desktop graph view (use Obsidian or Logseq), or anyone unwilling to run a server — there is no managed hosted option.
Pros:
Cons:
Yes — if you want a self-hosted, capture-first note app and you are comfortable running a Docker container, Memos is currently the best-in-class option for that exact niche. We rate it 83/100: it loses points for the deliberately narrow data model and the lack of an official mobile app, but it earns its score through a tight scope, an aggressive feature pace, an excellent API, and a level of polish unusual for a free MIT-licensed project. If you want a Twitter for one and you do not want a SaaS to ever read your notes, install Memos.
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