head to head · open source
Memos vs pm-brain
Memos has 64,235 GitHub stars, 4,935 forks, 67 open issues and last shipped yesterday. pm-brain has 952 stars, 193 forks, 3 open issues and last shipped 6 months ago. Memos leads on adoption by 6,647% (64,235 vs 952 stars). Memos is written in Go under MIT; pm-brain is written in Python under MIT. Memos has attracted 8% as many forks as stars, pm-brain 20%. Memos was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Memos | pm-brain | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 64K | ★ 952 |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-05-20 |
| Forks | ⑂ 4.9K | ⑂ 193 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Memos if
- You weight community size — 64K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick pm-brain if
- You want the pm-brain feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and pm-brain fits your workflow better
About Memos
✨ Featured sponsor: CodeRabbit — Industry leading AI code reviews. Memos Fast enough for every thought. Private enough for all of them. Memos is an open source, self hosted home for short form thinking. Daily notes, links, work logs, and snippets flow into a chronological Markdown timeline—on infrastructure you control, without the overhead of an all in one workspace. Run with Docker · Try the live demo · Read the docs Why Memos? Capture quickly — Write in Markdown, attach media, and save without choosing a title, folder, or template. Organize lightly — Revisit notes through the timeline, search, tags, and pins…
read the full Memos overview →
About pm-brain
PM Brain A second brain for product managers. Plain markdown files in a folder on your laptop. Claude reads them before answering, writes to them after, sweeps them every Friday. No vector DB. No cloud. No agent memory tricks. You manage one product. Your context is scattered across Notion, Linear, Slack, your dashboards, and your head. You ship a feature. Six weeks later, nobody remembers why you killed the other option. PM Brain fixes that. See it in action: A week with PM Brain: Lena's first five days is a short story of one PM using it on a real team. New here? Start there. Research preview. The architecture…
read the full pm-brain overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Memos or pm-brain more popular?
Memos has 64,235 GitHub stars and pm-brain has 952. Memos has the larger community by that measure.
Are Memos and pm-brain free?
Both are open source. Memos is licensed under MIT and pm-brain under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Memos and pm-brain?
Memos is written in Go and pm-brain in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Memos or pm-brain?
Choose Memos if you want the larger community (64,235 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose pm-brain if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.