Gollum vs Memos
| Tagline | Simple Git-backed wiki with Markdown support and a local web frontend | Lightweight, self-hosted note-taking and memo hub |
| Category | Notes & Knowledge Base | Notes & Knowledge Base |
| Replaces | Notion, Confluence | Evernote, Notion |
| GitHub stars | 14k | 61k |
| Language | Ruby | Go |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Self-host difficulty | 2/5 Easy | 2/5 Easy |
| Deploy options | Docker Manual | Docker Manual |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | 6 months ago | 3 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.
Gollum
- No real-time collaboration; concurrent edits require Git merge conflict resolution.
- Access control is all-or-nothing unless fronted by a reverse proxy with auth.
- No rich media embeds, databases, or kanban views that modern note tools offer.
- Search is basic file-content grep; no full-text index for large wikis.
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
Both are a similar lift to self-host; 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.