MediaWiki vs Memos
| Tagline | The battle-tested wiki engine powering Wikipedia, built for scale | Lightweight, self-hosted note-taking and memo hub |
| Category | Notes & Knowledge Base | Notes & Knowledge Base |
| Replaces | Confluence, Notion | Evernote, Notion |
| GitHub stars | 4.2k | 61k |
| Language | PHP | Go |
| License | GPL-2.0 | MIT |
| Self-host difficulty | 3/5 Moderate | 2/5 Easy |
| Deploy options | Docker Docker Compose Manual | Docker Manual |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | 26 days 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.
MediaWiki
- Wikitext markup is unfamiliar to most users; modern WYSIWYG editing via VisualEditor requires extra setup
- No built-in real-time collaboration; concurrent edits require manual conflict resolution
- No native mobile editor app; mobile experience is read-optimised only
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 Memos 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.