Memos review: an open-source, self-hosted Markdown note-taking app. See features, deployment options, free pricing, and top alternatives for 2026.
Memos is a free, open-source note-taking application designed for people who want full control over their notes without relying on a cloud subscription service. Instead of a traditional folder-and-document structure, Memos presents notes as a reverse-chronological timeline, similar to a personal microblog, making it well suited to capturing short-form thoughts, links, and daily logs quickly.
The project is self-hosted, meaning users run their own instance on a server, VPS, home lab device such as a Raspberry Pi, or a cloud container platform. Because the entire codebase is MIT-licensed and available on GitHub, anyone can inspect, modify or extend it, and there is no dependency on an external company staying in business to keep the notes accessible.
At its core, Memos supports Markdown formatting with syntax highlighting, tables and LaTeX math, along with drag-and-drop attachments for images, video, audio and documents. A flexible tagging system and full-text search make it easy to retrieve older notes, while public sharing links let users publish individual memos without exposing their entire notebook.
Technically, Memos ships as a single Go binary and a compact Docker image, supports SQLite, MySQL or PostgreSQL as the storage backend, and exposes REST and gRPC APIs for building custom integrations. The interface is a progressive web app with offline support and a dark mode, and all data can be exported to Markdown, JSON or CSV at any time.
Memos itself carries no license fee: the software is entirely free and open source under the MIT license, with no paid tiers, subscriptions or per-user charges built into the product.
The only cost users incur is whatever infrastructure they choose to run it on, such as a small VPS, a home server, or a container hosting platform, which for a lightweight single-Go-binary app is typically inexpensive.
Yes, Memos is completely free and open source under the MIT license, with no subscription fees or paid tiers.
Yes, Memos does not offer an official managed cloud version, so users deploy it themselves on a server, VPS, home device such as a Raspberry Pi, or a container platform such as Docker.
Memos supports SQLite, MySQL and PostgreSQL as its storage backend, letting users choose based on the scale of their deployment.
Yes, Memos supports exporting notes to Markdown, JSON or CSV, so data always remains portable.
Yes, Memos is Markdown-native and supports syntax highlighting, tables, LaTeX math, and drag-and-drop images, video, audio and document attachments.
Memos is maintained by the usememos open-source community on GitHub, led by its original developer, with contributions from a large community of volunteers.