OneTab alternatives (2026): 6 tested, and when to keep OneTab

OneTab does one thing: it turns every open tab into a list. So "OneTab alternative" is three different requests wearing one name. If you want the list done better, you want a session saver. If you want the list replaced by projects, you want a workspace. If you want the tabs left alone and simply findable, you want a finder. Pick the kind first; the tools are easy after that.

Six of them below, with price, storage, Firefox and licence checked against the live store listings on 27 August 2026. One of the six is ours — SideBoo, the last entry — and it is flagged again there.

When OneTab is still the right tool

Most pages with this title never say it, so: there are readers here who should close this tab and keep what they have.

Keep OneTab if the list is the point. Click, everything collapses, memory comes back, and the result is plain text that cannot break. There is no account, no schema and no sync to go wrong, and after twelve years the format is still the same.

Keep OneTab if you use it as an emergency valve rather than a filing system. Thirty tabs, an unusable tab strip, one click, back to a readable browser — nothing else in this article is faster at that.

Keep OneTab if you are on more than one browser. It ships on Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari; two of the six alternatives below are Chrome-only, and two more have a Firefox build that stopped moving over a year ago.

And keep it if your tab list is your archive. OneTab never sends your URLs anywhere; the only exception is the share-as-a-web-page button, which is a deliberate click. Two of the six alternatives require an account before they do anything at all.

The reason to leave is narrower than the roundups suggest, and it is not a missing feature. Collapsing tabs moves the pile rather than shrinking it — one user reported 252 tabs sitting in their OneTab, a pattern we took apart in why you can't close your tabs. If that is your OneTab, a better collapse button will not help. What follows is sorted by which part of the problem each tool actually takes on.

Quick comparison

Every name links to its Chrome Web Store listing. Prices, versions and update dates were read there on 27 August 2026; Firefox rows were checked on the Mozilla add-ons site the same day. All seven are Manifest V3, which is now the only kind Chrome runs.

Session Buddy — the same job, with names on it

Replaces: the list, and the part of OneTab where everything ends up in one undifferentiated pile. Session Buddy saves whole sessions you can name, tag and search, restores windows and tabs exactly as they were before a crash, and treats a few thousand tabs as normal load rather than an edge case. It is free with no account — its listing states plainly that every feature is free, and that a future opt-in cloud store would be the only paid one — and 900,000 users rate it 4.7 across 25,100 ratings, the best-reviewed tool in this comparison.

Does not replace: portability. There is no sync, by design, and the listing says so — data is local for privacy. There is no Firefox build. And it is closed source, so "local only" is a promise rather than something you can read.

Pick it if OneTab is right in shape and wrong in scale: you liked collapsing tabs, and what broke was that the list grew into one long unlabelled column.

Tab Session Manager — the automatic one, and the open source one

Replaces: the clicking. Tab Session Manager auto-saves when a window closes and again at an interval you set, so the thing OneTab requires you to remember happens whether you remember or not. Sessions carry names and tags, it saves and restores Chrome tab groups without a helper extension, and it imports Session Buddy backups. It is MPL-2.0 licensed with public source, runs on Firefox and Edge as well as Chrome, and was last updated on 18 July 2026 — the most recently maintained third-party tool here.

Does not replace: taste. It is the least polished interface in this list, and its 3.5 store rating (442 ratings) reflects a tool built by one developer for people who wanted the function. The optional cloud sync is convenience layered on top; the default is local.

Pick it if your requirement includes the word "open source", "Firefox" or "automatic". It is the only tool here that satisfies all three.

Toby — a workspace instead of a list

Replaces: the whole metaphor. Toby lives on your new tab page as a visual board of collections, so instead of one dated list you get named projects you can see at a glance, sync across devices, and rebuild a morning's context from in one click. It has AI grouping and search across everything saved, and reports 300,000 users in 144 countries.

Does not replace: free and unlimited. The free tier caps at 60 saved tabs — a number some readers here will pass on their first afternoon — and past that it is $6 per user per month, or $54 a year. Everything lives in a Toby account, not on your disk. The Firefox build exists but is a rounding error — about 1,900 daily users against 300,000 on Chrome — and the extension is 19.5 MB, roughly eight times the size of OneTab.

Pick it if you were never really collapsing tabs, you were saving research, and you want it to look like something when you come back.

Workona — projects that outlive the browser

Replaces: the browser as the unit of work. Workona organises tabs into spaces per project, suspends what you are not using, auto-saves every tab against a crash, and joins up documents from Drive, Slack, Asana and Notion inside the same space. It is the only competitor in this category doing content marketing, which is why its own OneTab comparison page probably brought you here.

Does not replace: independence, and possibly not currency. Work lives in a Workona account. The free tier is real but the useful limits — unlimited spaces, 90-day session backups — sit behind Pro, and pricing is not published on the pricing page; you sign up to find out. The bigger flag is dates: the Chrome listing was last updated on 14 January 2025, and the Firefox add-on on 30 May 2025 with about 1,800 daily users and a 3.5 rating. Treat the Firefox build as available rather than maintained.

Pick it if you are coordinating a project across cloud apps and a browser extension is the smallest part of what you need.

Tab Manager Plus — search what you already have open

Replaces: the reason you were collapsing. Open it, start typing, and it filters every tab in every window by title and URL; Enter switches. It highlights duplicates, moves tabs between windows, and can cap tabs per window so a new one opens a new window instead. It stores nothing, needs no account, is MPL-2.0 with public source, and has a Firefox build. 200,000 users, 4.7 across 1,100 ratings.

Does not replace: saving. Nothing survives closing the tab — this is a view over live tabs, not an archive, so it is a complement to OneTab rather than a substitute if you also need the tabs back tomorrow. And it is the stalest tool here: Chrome version 6.0.0, last updated 2 October 2024. It still runs, and the source is public if it ever stops.

Pick it if what you actually wanted from OneTab was to stop scrolling the tab strip, and you never once reopened the list.

SideBoo — find one tab among fifty without filing anything

We make this one, so read this entry with that in mind; everything above is checkable against the links in the table, and so is this.

Replaces: the premise. Session savers, workspaces and OneTab all assume the answer is fewer tabs open. SideBoo assumes you will keep the tabs and makes the missing one reachable: ⌘K on any page opens one search box across open tabs, history, bookmarks and recently closed pages, with matches highlighted. Nothing has to be organised first, because nothing is being filed. The AI features — grouping, summarising, cleanup suggestions — run through your own API key, so there is no subscription and no signup, and the key stays on your device.

Does not replace: the archive. It does not collapse tabs into a saved list, so if what you want is to close 40 tabs now and reopen them next Tuesday, you want a way to save tabs, not a search box. It is Chrome and Chromium only — no Firefox — and it is new: version 0.0.3, published 15 August 2026, with the install count to match.

Pick it if the sentence that describes your problem is "I have fifty tabs open and I cannot find the one I need." If it is "I have fifty tabs open and I want them gone", pick one of the five above.

OneTab alternative for Firefox

Start with the fact the roundups skip: OneTab is already on Firefox, at version 2.19, updated 9 August 2026, with about 153,000 daily users. Leaving because of Firefox is usually leaving for no reason.

If you do want a different tool there, four of the six ship a Firefox build and only one is both current and actually used. Tab Session Manager is that one — same 7.4.0 version as its Chrome build, updated 17 July 2026, about 149,000 daily Firefox users, 4.2 across 1,232 ratings. Tab Manager Plus for Firefox sits at version 5.2.4 and has not moved since October 2024. Toby ships a current build (1.13.2, 2 June 2026) that about 1,900 people use daily, against 300,000 on Chrome, and Workona's has roughly 1,800 and a 3.5 rating. Session Buddy and SideBoo have no Firefox build at all.

Open source OneTab alternative

OneTab is closed source, which for a tool holding your entire reading list is a fair thing to mind. Two of the six here are not, and both use the same licence.

Tab Session Manager — MPL-2.0, source public, actively developed, and the closest functional match to OneTab in this article. This is the answer to the question as usually asked.

Tab Manager Plus — MPL-2.0, source public, but a finder rather than a saver, and last released in October 2024.

Everything else in this comparison, ours included, is closed source. If open source is a requirement rather than a preference, those two are the list.

What Reddit says

The threads that discuss this are not tool comparisons; they are people describing tab overload, and the tools come up as answers. We read about two dozen of them for why you can't close your tabs, and two things recur.

OneTab is the most recommended tool in those threads, by a wide margin. In r/ADHD's "Any Tab Hoarders?" (1,701 upvotes, 520 comments) and r/declutter's tab-hoarding thread, it is the first thing suggested to almost everyone who asks. That is worth weighing against everything above: the crowd's answer is the tool you already have.

The follow-up report is always the same. The list becomes the next pile. The 252-tab figure comes from one of these threads — one person's account, not a measurement, but it is the shape of the complaint rather than an outlier. In work-context threads like r/sysadmin's "Too many tabs." (847 upvotes), the same story arrives with a different ending: the tabs were open because each one was an unfinished job, and collapsing them did not finish any.

That is why the searches say onetab alternative and the answers say "a different collapse tool", and why they keep not working. If the list is where your tabs go to be forgotten, the tool to change is not the one that makes the list.

Which one to pick

Answer one question — what did you want OneTab to do?

Save the tabs properly: Session Buddy, or Tab Session Manager if you want it automatic, open source or on Firefox.

Organise the work, not the tabs: Toby if it is personal research and 60 saved tabs is enough, Workona if it is a project spanning several cloud apps.

Stop losing tabs you never closed: Tab Manager Plus, or SideBoo if you want history, bookmarks and recently closed pages in the same search box.

None of the above: keep OneTab. It is free, it is on every browser, it does not phone home, and it still does the thing it was written to do. If you want the wider view, our best Chrome extensions roundup covers the rest of the browser, and SideBoo is where ours lives.