Memos vs Paperless-ngx
| Tagline | Lightweight, self-hosted note-taking and memo hub | Scan, index, and archive paper documents with full-text search and AI tagging |
| Category | Notes & Knowledge Base | Notes & Knowledge Base |
| Replaces | Evernote, Notion | Evernote, Notion |
| GitHub stars | 61k | 42k |
| Language | Go | Python |
| License | MIT | GPL-3.0 |
| Self-host difficulty | 2/5 Easy | 3/5 Moderate |
| Deploy options | Docker Manual | Docker Docker Compose |
| Managed hosting | ||
| Last updated | 3 days ago | today |
| View repo | View repo |
Where each falls short
The honest trade-offs — what you give up with each, versus the proprietary tools they replace.
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.
Paperless-ngx
- Primarily a document archive, not a note-taking or collaboration tool.
- Mobile scanning requires a third-party app (e.g., Scanbot) pointing at the consume folder.
- No real-time collaboration or shared editing of documents.
- Initial OCR processing of large backlogs can be slow and CPU-intensive.
Bottom line
Choose Memos if you want the lower-effort setup; choose Memos for the larger community and ecosystem. Paperless-ngx has seen more recent development. Open each guide below for deploy steps and the full feature gap.
Paperless-ngx
Scan, index, and archive paper documents with full-text search and AI tagging