Memos significantly outpaces Zen in community adoption with 61,808 stars compared to 1,126 stars on GitHub. This 54.9x difference suggests Memos has a much larger and more active community. In terms of developer contributions, Memos has 4,591 forks, indicating strong developer engagement.

Memos shows more recent development activity with its last commit 14 hours ago, while Zen was last updated 3 months ago. This suggests Memos is being more actively maintained.

Both tools share common technology foundations, being built with JavaScript, CSS, JSX, Golang. However, they differ in their additional technology choices: Memos uses Bash, Typescript.

Memos has been in development longer, starting 5 years ago, compared to Zen which began 1 year ago. This 3.2-year head start suggests Memos may have more mature features and established processes.

Memos uses the MIT license, which is more permissive than Zen's AGPL-3.0 license, potentially offering greater flexibility for commercial use and integration.

Both tools serve similar use cases in Note-Taking. However, they also have distinct specializations: Memos also focuses on Personal Knowledge Management (PKM), Secure & Encrypted Notes.

Memos provides self-hosting options for complete data control and customization, while Zen may be primarily cloud-based or require different deployment approaches.