Foam vs Memos
| Tagline | VS Code extension for personal knowledge management inspired by Roam Research | Lightweight, self-hosted note-taking and memo hub |
| Category | Notes & Knowledge Base | Notes & Knowledge Base |
| Replaces | Notion, Obsidian | Evernote, Notion |
| GitHub stars | 15k | 61k |
| Language | TypeScript | Go |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Self-host difficulty | 1/5 Effortless | 2/5 Easy |
| Deploy options | Manual | Docker Manual |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | 2 months ago | 6 days ago |
| View repo | View repo |
Where each falls short
The honest trade-offs — what you give up with each, versus the proprietary tools they replace.
Foam
- Entirely dependent on VS Code; not usable on mobile or without the editor
- No real-time multi-user collaboration features
- Plugin ecosystem is much smaller than Obsidian; fewer community extensions
Memos
- Designed for short notes/memos, not long structured documents or wikis.
- No nested page hierarchy, databases, or board views.
- No real-time collaboration.
- Limited rich formatting compared to block editors.
Bottom line
Choose Foam if you want the lower-effort setup; choose Memos for the larger community and ecosystem. Memos has seen more recent development. Open each guide below for deploy steps and the full feature gap.
Foam
VS Code extension for personal knowledge management inspired by Roam Research