Memos

What Memos does

Memos is a self-hosted place for short notes. There are no titles, folders or nested pages: you type a memo in Markdown, it lands on a timeline by date, and tags in the text group related memos. A calendar view, tag filters and full-text search bring older memos back. The format works well for quick thoughts, links, journaling and a personal log, much like a private microblog.

Each memo has its own visibility: private, visible to signed-in users of the instance, or public. Share links, including links that expire, let you show a single memo to someone else. Spaces, reactions and comments make the same instance usable by a family or a small group of friends.

Integrations

For an app this small, Memos is easy to automate. It has REST and gRPC APIs, API tokens, webhooks and an MCP server for AI tools. A web clipper for Chrome and Firefox and a Telegram bot called Memogram send content into it from elsewhere. Sign-in can use OAuth2 providers for single sign-on.

Self-hosting Memos

Memos runs as a single Go service with a React interface. The docs cover Docker, Docker Compose, Kubernetes, a plain binary and building from source. SQLite is the default database, so a basic install needs nothing else and all data sits in one folder; MySQL and PostgreSQL are supported when you want a separate database server. Attachments can be stored in the database, on the local disk or in S3-compatible storage.

Releases are tagged by year and month. Upgrades from versions older than 0.31.0 have to pass through 0.31.0 first, which is worth knowing before upgrading an old instance. Administrators can make the whole instance private and disable public memos.

The whole repository is under the MIT license, with no paid edition.

Hosted version

There is no official hosted service. The website describes Memos as self-hosted and offers a public demo instance for trying it.

Limitations

Memos is deliberately narrow. It is not built for long documents, nested pages or a team wiki, and it does not try to replace a full notebook app such as Evernote or a linked knowledge base such as Obsidian. There is no end-to-end encryption, so whoever runs the server can read the memos. The website and README list no official native mobile apps. Export and import use a ZIP format meant for moving between Memos instances, and the docs list no importers from other note apps.

Who it suits

Memos suits self-hosters who want a fast, private capture tool for short notes and links, cheap enough to run on the smallest server. For longer notes in notebooks, look at Joplin; for linked, structured knowledge, Trilium Notes or Logseq. The category guide compares the approaches.