AFFiNE vs Memos

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 550 words

A 16x difference in minimum RAM — 64 MB for Memos, 1,024 MB for AFFiNE — is the most truthful spec in this matchup, because it measures ambition. Memos wants to be the fastest possible place to write a thought down. AFFiNE wants to be Notion and Miro at once: documents, an edgeless whiteboard canvas, and databases sharing a single workspace with real-time collaboration. Neither is a bloated or stripped-down version of the other; they are aimed at different afternoons.

The canvas is the real decision point

Strip away the shared "notes" label and AFFiNE's differentiator is edgeless mode: any document can flip into an infinite canvas where text blocks, drawings, and embeds live spatially. If your thinking happens in diagrams, mind maps, and arrows between boxes, no memo timeline will ever substitute, and AFFiNE (MIT, TypeScript, 71,881 stars since 2022) is one of very few self-hosted tools merging that canvas with serious documents. But interrogate the need. If you sketch occasionally and write constantly, a dedicated Excalidraw beside a lightweight notes app covers the same ground with far less machinery.

Memos has no canvas, no databases, and no pretense of either. It gives you a reverse-chronological Markdown timeline with tags, filtering, and a REST API — a private microblog rather than a workspace, and all the better for it when raw capture speed is the goal.

Operational weight, measured

Memos: one Go binary in one container with embedded SQLite, 64 MB minimum, Easy rating, and essentially nothing to maintain. It is the kind of service that survives three server migrations without ever appearing in your notes about what needs fixing.

AFFiNE: Docker-only, 1,024 MB minimum, Medium difficulty, and the catalogue flags both "resource intensive" and "self-hosting still maturing." That maturity note matches the project's trajectory — a fast-moving codebase whose hosted cloud gets features ahead of the self-hosted release, so expect version upgrades to demand actual attention. Its local-first data model does soften the risk: your content lives with the clients, not only on the server.

Multi-user changes the answer

The catalogue tags Memos single-user and AFFiNE multi-user with real-time collaboration, and this is the cleanest fork in the road. Two people editing one document simultaneously is table stakes in AFFiNE and simply not what Memos does. Solo self-hosters can ignore this row entirely; households and small teams cannot.

Decision table

What I'd do

Default to Memos unless the whiteboard or collaboration requirement is concrete — not "might be nice" but "I did this in Miro last week." It delivers its whole value in the first ten minutes and never asks for anything again. If the requirement is real, run AFFiNE with eyes open about its Medium-difficulty, still-maturing backend, and keep exports current. And if you land on wanting a structured workspace but not the canvas, the closer comparison is AppFlowy vs Memos — or browse the whole notes category before committing.