Memos

What is Memos?

Memos is an open-source, lightweight note-taking service focused on quick capture. It supports Markdown, tags, pinned notes and sharing, and keeps everything in a single database file. Ideal if you want fast private notes without the weight of a full knowledge base.

Best for

People who want fast, private, no-friction note capture

Why choose Memos

Memos is for the thought you want to write down right now in a place that is yours. No folders to choose, no schema to satisfy — just a box, a line of Markdown, a tag, and it is saved. It runs from a single small binary with a single file database, which means you can back it up by copying one file. It is the closest thing to a private social feed for your own notes, and the effort to start using it is essentially zero.

Replaces

• Simplenote
• Google Keep
• Bear

Key features

• Markdown with tags
• Single-file database
• Public sharing of individual memos
• Mobile-friendly interface

What to watch out for

The deliberate simplicity is a ceiling. There is no rich editing, no real organisation beyond tags and time, and no serious search once your archive grows. Notes are plain text and Markdown, which is good for longevity but means anything structured lives in the text itself. The project develops at a rapid pace and has historically restructured its data format between versions, so read migration notes before updating, and the mobile experience is a wrapper rather than a first-class app.

How to deploy

• Docker

Getting started

Use the single binary with SQLite for a personal instance; a database server would defeat the point. Put the data directory somewhere you back up, and confirm you know which single file holds your notes. Set up one user account and then disable registration — this is one of the most commonly forgotten steps, and an open Memos instance is a public notepad. Decide your tagging convention in the first week; a growing pile of un-tagged memos is much harder to organise later.

Typical setup

It runs on the smallest machine you have — a tiny VPS, a home server, even a Raspberry Pi — as a container or single binary with SQLite. People use it for quick capture from a phone home-screen shortcut and for a running personal log. Because it is so light, it often coexists with larger services, and because backup is one file copy, most installations end up in a simple scripted snapshot alongside the rest of the stack.

Who should look elsewhere

Not a note-taking system for someone whose material is going to reach thousands of notes with real structure. There are no folders, no nested organisation and no serious search. Anyone who wants rich formatting, attachments and careful cross-referencing will be fighting the tool within a month and should look at a block-based knowledge base instead.

Project health

• GitHub stars: 63,457
• Last code push: 2026-09-28
• Open issues: 94
• Status: actively developed

Figures pulled from the GitHub API and refreshed periodically.