Tabkeeper vs Toby: a local-only Toby alternative

An honest comparison: what Toby is better at, what Tabkeeper does differently, and where our Toby import currently stands.

What Toby does better

• A visual grid. Toby's board of cards and collections is a nicer thing to look at and to organise by eye than a list.
• Teams and organisations. Collections can be shared with a team, which is a whole category of use Tabkeeper does not attempt.
• Cloud sync across devices. Your collections follow you to another machine or browser. Tabkeeper's data stays on the device it was saved on, by design, with backups as the way to move it.
• Tags and notes on saved items, for people who annotate what they keep.

If you want a shared, visual, cross-device workspace, Toby is built for that and Tabkeeper is not.

What Tabkeeper does differently

• Local only. Collections live in your browser's IndexedDB; settings in chrome.storage.local. The extension requests no host permissions and makes no network calls, apart from one license check if you buy Pro.
• No account. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to sign in to, nothing to lose access to.
• No cap. Unlimited collections and tabs per collection, on the free tier.
• Open source. The source will be public when it ships, so the claim above can be checked rather than believed.
• Backups you hold. Pro writes encrypted backups to a file you choose, with a passphrase only you know. Free plain-JSON export is always available.

Importing from Toby

Toby exports from the collection's ⋮ menu → Export; several collections at once by selecting them with the checkboxes and using Export on the bottom bar; or everything at once from Account Settings → Export Data. Choose JSON: it is the format that carries the most detail. Then pick that file in Tabkeeper's import box.

Being straight about this one: the Toby importer is written to Toby's documented export format and is covered by tests against that schema, but it has not yet been checked against a real export file — unlike the OneTab and Session Buddy importers, which have been. It should work, and unknown fields are ignored rather than allowed to break the import. If yours does not import cleanly, write to support@quietshift.dev and we will fix it. Lists become collections, and the title you typed on a card wins over the page title.

What Tabkeeper costs

Free for unlimited collections, saving and restoring, search, the importers, and plain JSON export, keyboard shortcuts and tab groups. Pro is $29, one-time and adds encrypted backups with a passphrase (AES-256-GCM) and session history with undo.

Tabkeeper Privacy policy

The other comparisons

• vs OneTab
• vs Session Buddy
• vs Toby
• vs Workona