Mem alternatives in 2026: 9 options after the plan change
Mem now runs Free, Plus $9, Pro $29 and Pro 2x $49. Nine alternatives ranked, with every price read on the vendor's own pricing page on 14 September 2026.
The short answer
If you are leaving Mem over price, Reflect at $10 a month and Saner.AI from $8 are the closest like-for-like swaps. If you are leaving because the auto-organised pile never got opened again, the answer is not another inbox: try Gemini Notebook for a fixed set of sources, or a recall layer such as dEssence for everything else. Notion AI is the pick if you want the notes to sit beside the work.
Every price below was read on the vendor's own pricing page on 14 September 2026.
What Mem costs now, and why the old numbers are wrong
Mem changed shape this year. Its own site now calls it an AI chief of staff rather than a notes app that files itself, and the plans were rebuilt around metered usage. Read live on get.mem.ai/pricing on 14 September 2026:
| Plan | Price | New notes a month | Messages a month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 25 | 25 |
| Plus | $9 a month | 50 | 50 |
| Pro | $29 a month | 100 | 100 |
| Pro 2x | $49 a month | 200 | 200 |
Voice Mode runs 3 hours on Free, 10 on Plus, 25 on Pro and 50 on Pro 2x. Custom Routines and Connections to Gmail, Slack or Todoist start on Pro, at one of each, and double on Pro 2x. Note that mem.ai/pricing now redirects to a login screen; the pricing lives on get.mem.ai. Reviews still quoting around $12 for Mem Pro, including an earlier version of this page, are out of date.
Two things follow from that table, and both break the comparison most pages still make.
Mem is no longer simply the expensive one. Plus at $9 a month undercuts Reflect at $10 and Capacities Pro at €8.99. If money is the only reason you are reading this, Plus is cheaper than most of what you would move to.
The real constraint is metering, not price. Almost everything is counted per month, including new notes: 25 on Free, 50 on Plus, 100 on Pro. Someone who takes five notes on a normal working day passes the Pro allowance before the month ends. That is a different kind of limit from a flat subscription, and it is the one worth checking before you either pay or leave.
Count two numbers before you compare anything
- How many new notes did you create last month? Comfortably under fifty and Plus at $9 is the cheapest serious option here, so the case for leaving is weak. Over a hundred and Mem's metering binds at every tier, which makes a flat-price tool the better shape.
- How many times did you go back to find something, rather than to write something? If writing dominates, you want a notes tool. If finding dominates, no notes tool fixes it, whatever it costs.
The second number is the one people skip, and it is the one that decides whether a migration helps at all.
How we picked
- Price read on the vendor's own pricing page on 14 September 2026, with the billing period named.
- It has to do something with AI that a plain notes app does not, because that is what you would be giving up.
- One person has to get value from it without a team paying.
- Every entry says where it falls short, ours included.
dEssence is our product and it is number 5. It is here because a specific complaint about Mem, that automatic filing did not make you come back, is the only problem it works on. It is not a notes app and does not replace one.
The nine at a glance: price and platforms
| # | App | Price on 14 Sep 2026 | Runs on |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Notion AI | Free $0; Plus $12 monthly, $10 yearly; Business $24 monthly, $20 yearly, per member | Web, Mac, Windows, iOS, Android |
| 2 | Reflect | One plan, $10 a month billed annually, 14 day trial | Web, desktop, iOS, Chrome and Safari clipper |
| 3 | Gemini Notebook | Base tier free; higher limits come with Google AI Plus, Pro or Ultra, priced by region | Web, mobile app |
| 4 | Saner.AI | Free $0; Starter $8, Standard $16 a month billed yearly; Standard is $20 monthly | Web, Chrome extension, mobile app |
| 5 | dEssence | Free $0, no card; Pro $10 a month | Chrome extension, Telegram, web |
| 6 | Capacities | Basic free forever; Pro €8.99 a month | macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, web |
| 7 | Obsidian | Free, no sign-up; Sync $4 per user a month, Publish $8 per site a month, billed annually | Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, browser clipper |
| 8 | Tana Outliner | Free $0, 500 AI credits; Plus $8, Pro $14 a month billed yearly; $10 and $18 monthly | Mac, Windows, Linux, web, mobile apps |
| 9 | Heptabase | Pro $8.99, Premium $17.99, Premium+ $53.99 a month on the yearly rate | Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android |
The same nine: what the AI does and who it suits
| # | App | What the AI does | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Notion AI | Writes, searches the workspace, and on Business runs agents and meeting notes | Keeping the notes next to the work they belong to |
| 2 | Reflect | Transcribes voice with Whisper, improves writing, works across linked notes | The closest swap at a flat price, with encryption |
| 3 | Gemini Notebook | Answers from the sources you upload and shows the quote it used | A defined set of documents you need to question |
| 4 | Saner.AI | Answers across notes, tasks and synced sources in one chat | Messy workflows where tasks and notes are tangled |
| 5 | dEssence | Answers questions about what you saved and cites the saved items | The saves that auto-filing never made you reopen |
| 6 | Capacities | Typed objects, smart queries and an AI assistant on Pro | Structure that comes from what the thing is |
| 7 | Obsidian | Nothing built in. AI arrives through community plugins | Owning the files and picking the model yourself |
| 8 | Tana Outliner | A knowledge graph on supertags, with AI chat and transcription on credits | People whose unit of thought is a bullet, not a page |
| 9 | Heptabase | Whiteboards, PDF highlights, YouTube transcripts, an agent on credits | Research you need to see laid out |
1. Notion AI
The widest swap. If what you liked about Mem was having AI next to your material, Notion gives you the same thing with the projects, tasks and databases attached.
Price on 14 September 2026. Free $0 per member per month. Plus $12 per member per month billed monthly, or $10 billed yearly. Business $24 monthly, or $20 yearly. Agents are free to try, then $10 per 1,000 monthly Notion credits. Source: notion.com/pricing, read with the currency set to USD.
What you gain. Nothing is metered at 25 notes a month. The free tier is a real free tier for one person.
What you give up. Mem's agent watches your notes and comes back to you on its own. Notion's equivalent, Notion Agent, sits on the Business tier. On Free and Plus the page lists a trial of Notion AI.
Best for: people who want the notes to live beside the work rather than in a separate thinking space.
Where it falls short. You maintain the structure, and a large Notion gets harder to search rather than easier: why Notion stops being searchable at scale.
2. Reflect
The closest like-for-like. One plan, one price, linked notes, voice transcription, and an assistant on top. No tiers to compare and nothing metered per month.
Price on 14 September 2026. $10 a month, billed annually, with a 14 day trial. Source: reflect.app.
Runs on. Web and desktop, an iOS app that works offline, a clipper for Chrome and Safari, Kindle highlight sync, and connections to Google and Outlook calendars and contacts, plus Readwise and Zapier.
What the AI does. Reflect's own page says it uses GPT-4 and Whisper from OpenAI to transcribe voice notes, improve writing and act as a thought partner inside your notes.
Best for: people leaving Mem over the monthly caps who still want one tool that writes, transcribes and links.
Where it falls short. No free tier, only a trial. It is smaller than Notion in every direction, and there is no agent following up on your tasks the way Mem's does.
3. Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM)
Google renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook, and notebooklm.google now redirects to notebook.google. It is the answer to a different question from Mem's, and for a lot of people it is the question they actually had.
Price on 14 September 2026. The base tier is free. Higher usage limits and better models come with a Google AI Plus, Pro or Ultra subscription, priced by region and available only in certain countries, so no single number applies. Sources per notebook: 50 on the free tier, 100 on AI Plus, 300 on AI Pro, 600 on AI Ultra. Source: notebook.google/plans.
What the AI does. Reads PDFs, websites, YouTube videos, audio files, Google Docs and Slides, answers with the quote it used, and can turn the set into an Audio Overview you listen to.
Best for: the case where Mem was really doing research on a defined set of documents.
Where it falls short. It works only on what you upload into a notebook. It is not a daily capture tool and there is no agent chasing your tasks.
4. Saner.AI
Saner aims at the same person Mem aims at: someone with notes, tasks and half a dozen sources tangled together, who wants one chat that knows about all of it.
Price on 14 September 2026. Free $0 with 30 AI messages a month, 100 notes, 1MB per PDF and 100MB of storage. On annual billing, Starter is $8 a month and Standard $16 a month. Switching to monthly puts Standard at $20. Source: saner.ai/pricing.
Runs on. Web, a Chrome extension and a mobile app.
What the AI does. Answers across notes and tasks, syncs from Google Drive, email, Slack and Calendar, and reads text inside images and PDFs.
Best for: people who liked Mem's ambition and want a cheaper version with more connections at the lower tiers.
Where it falls short. Thirty AI messages a month on free is a short trial, and it is the smallest company on this list. Nearby options: Saner.AI alternatives.
5. dEssence
Ours, so the boundary first. dEssence is not a Mem replacement in the usual sense. There is no note to write, no workspace, no agent chasing your projects.
It is here for one reason. The most common complaint about auto-organising tools is not that the filing was bad. It is that a tidier pile is still a pile you never reopen. That is the only problem we work on.
Price on 14 September 2026. Free is $0 with no card: 20 saves a day, 20 messages a day, and 100 watched items checked daily. Pro is $10 a month: 150 saves a day, 200 messages a day, and 100 watched items checked hourly. Source: the pricing block on dessence.ai.
Runs on. A Chrome extension, a Telegram bot, and the web app.
What it does. You save links, articles, products, PDFs, screenshots, videos and voice notes from any of those three places, with no folders and no tags. Later you describe the thing the way you remember it, and the answer names the saved items it came from. Saved YouTube videos come back with a short text summary. A saved product page keeps the price and availability that were on it, and you can ask for a watch so you hear when the price moves or it is back in stock.
Best for: the gap between saving something and needing it two months later. See also when Mem becomes another inbox.
Where it falls short. No offline mode, no native iOS or Android app, no team workspace, and it does not read your inbox. Nothing writes notes for you and nothing tracks your projects. If Mem's agent is the part you would miss, none of this replaces it.
6. Capacities
Capacities takes the opposite approach to Mem's. Instead of the AI deciding where things go, the structure comes from what the thing is: a book, a person and a project each carry their own fields.
Price on 14 September 2026. Basic is free, and the pricing page states the core product is and will remain free: unlimited spaces, objects and blocks, sync, unlimited custom object types, full import and export, saving from WhatsApp, Telegram, Twitter or email, full-text search, offline support and up to 5GB of media. Pro is €8.99 a month and adds task management, the AI assistant, calendar integrations, smart queries, related content, weblink and image analysis, version history and API access. Source: capacities.io/pricing, shown in euros.
Best for: people who suspect that automatic organisation was the wrong fix, and that they wanted the structure to mean something.
Where it falls short. The AI assistant is behind Pro, and the object model takes real effort to set up. Nearby options: Capacities alternatives without the setup overhead.
7. Obsidian
The choice for people whose real objection to Mem was that the notes lived in someone else's product and were metered by the month.
Price on 14 September 2026. Free with no sign-up. Sync $4 per user per month billed annually. Publish $8 per site per month billed annually. Catalyst $25 one time. Commercial $50 per user per year, which Obsidian's FAQ says is not required. Source: obsidian.md/pricing.
Runs on. Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and a Web Clipper for Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, Brave, Arc, Orion and Vivaldi.
What the AI does. Nothing on its own. Obsidian ships no first-party AI. You add it through community plugins, usually with your own API key, which means you pay the model provider directly instead of a subscription.
Best for: people who want no caps and no vendor, and are willing to assemble the AI part themselves.
Where it falls short. The assembly is the cost. Plugin quality and upkeep are your problem. See Obsidian alternatives.
8. Tana Outliner
Tana split into two products, and the split matters here. tana.inc is now Tana, an agentic meeting platform. The outliner that people mean when they say Tana lives at outliner.tana.inc and is called Tana Outliner. Its own home page states the separation in plain terms. This entry is about the outliner.
Everything is a node, and supertags give those nodes a type, so a bullet can be a person, a task or a meeting and still sit in the same flow of thought.
Price on 14 September 2026. Free is $0 with 500 AI credits, supertags, task management, live searches, up to 3 workspaces and 0.5GB of uploads. Plus is $8 a month billed yearly, or $10 monthly. Pro is $14 a month billed yearly, or $18 monthly, and adds deeper AI, voice and automation. Source: outliner.tana.inc/pricing.
Runs on. Mac, Windows, Linux and the web, with mobile apps listed on the site.
What the AI does. Chat with your notes inline, meeting transcription up to 100 minutes on the free tier, and voice transcription in 60 languages. It is metered in credits, so heavy use moves you up a tier.
Best for: people whose natural unit of thought is a bullet rather than a page, and who want that bullet to carry a type.
Where it falls short. Supertags are a schema, and a schema is upkeep you have to keep doing. The AI runs on credits, so the real monthly cost depends on usage. And the naming is genuinely confusing right now: search results, and older reviews, mix the two products up.
9. Heptabase
The option for people whose notes are research and who want to see the pieces rather than have them filed away.
Price on 14 September 2026. On the yearly rate, Pro is $8.99 a month with unlimited notes, whiteboards and tags, PDF highlights, YouTube transcripts, an AI agent on Gemini models and 100 AI credits a month. Premium is $17.99 a month with unlimited PDF parsing and OCR, a wider set of models and 1,800 credits. Premium+ is $53.99 a month with 8,100 credits. No free tier is listed. Source: heptabase.com/pricing.
Best for: thesis work, literature reviews and decisions with many moving parts.
Where it falls short. No free tier, and the AI is metered in credits, so the real monthly cost depends on your usage. Nearby options: Heptabase alternatives.
The question underneath all of this
Mem's pitch was that organising is the hard part, so the AI should do it. For a lot of people that turned out to be the wrong diagnosis. The filing was never what stopped them. What stopped them was never going back.
An inbox that tidies itself is still an inbox. If you have already abandoned two note apps, the honest test is not how good the tagging is. It is whether you can get one specific thing back three months later using only the words you would naturally use.
So before comparing features, run this:
- Open the last note app you gave up on.
- Count how many times you opened it to find something, not to save something.
- Try to recover one item from meaning alone, with no title and no folder.
- Pick for whichever of those numbers is the broken one.
Frequently asked questions
How much does Mem cost in 2026?
Free $0, Plus $9 a month, Pro $29 a month and Pro 2x $49 a month, read on get.mem.ai/pricing on 14 September 2026. The free plan allows 25 messages and 25 new notes a month. Older reviews quoting around $12 for Mem Pro are out of date.
What is the best free Mem alternative?
Gemini Notebook, if your material is documents you can upload: the base tier is free and allows up to 50 sources per notebook. Obsidian is free with no account, though you add the AI yourself. Notion's free tier works for one person. Capacities Basic is free and its pricing page says the core product stays free.
Which alternative is closest to Mem?
Reflect, at $10 a month billed annually. Linked notes, voice transcription through Whisper, an assistant inside the notes, calendar integration and encryption, at one flat price with nothing metered per month.
Does any of these follow up on tasks the way Mem does?
Mem's agent is unusual, and the nearest equivalents are Saner.AI's task system with synced sources, and Notion Agent on the Business tier. Nothing on this list matches Mem's Custom Routines exactly.
Does Mem still do semantic search?
Yes. Mem's search works on meaning rather than keywords alone, and that is not the weakness people cite. The complaint is about whether a tidy archive makes you come back to it.
Can I use two of these at once?
Yes, and it is usually the cheaper answer. One tool for writing and thinking, one for the loose material that never became a note. Trying to make a single app do both is how most people end up with two piles instead of one.