Toby starts out feeling like the answer. You make a few collections, drag your tabs onto the board, and for a while everything has a place. Then the board grows. Every new tab needs a decision about where it goes, a "Misc" collection quietly becomes the biggest one, and the collections you made six months ago no longer match how you work. At some point you realize you spend more time tending the board than using it, and the page you saved last month is in there somewhere, under a title you can't quite remember.
If that sounds familiar, you're probably looking for a Toby alternative. This guide is written for people who have already decided to move on and want to know where to go. It covers why people leave, what to look for in a replacement so you don't end up in the same spot, five tools worth considering, and a practical way to move your tabs out without losing anything. If you are still deciding between Toby and another tool, that's a different question, and we cover it below with a link to the right place.
Why people look for a Toby alternative
The reasons are usually less about Toby being bad and more about the work it asks of you as your library grows.
Every save is a filing decision. Toby's board is made of collections you create, and when you save a tab you choose which collection it goes into, or make a new one first. With ten tabs a week that's fine. With fifty, it turns into a small chore you repeat dozens of times, and the temptation to dump everything into one catch-all collection wins.
The board needs upkeep as it grows. Collections drift. A project ends, a topic splits in two, an old collection fills with links that belong somewhere else. Keeping the board useful means periodically reorganizing it, and that's work nobody schedules. Many users find that once a board passes a few dozen cards, the structure they built stops reflecting what's actually in it.
Finding things depends on remembering how you filed them. On a manual board, you find a tab by remembering which collection you put it in, or what the page was titled. That works when the board is small and you filed carefully. It gets harder when you remember what a page was about but not its title or where you put it.
To be fair to Toby, it does one thing genuinely well: visual scanning. A tidy Toby board, with collections as columns and tabs as cards, is easy to take in at a glance, and if you enjoy curating that board it can feel satisfying in a way a plain list never does. If you keep your board small and tidy and that's working, you may not need to switch at all.
If you came here weighing Toby against OneTab specifically, we've written a full head to head in our comparison of Toby and OneTab as OneTab alternatives. This page is about what to move to once you've decided to leave.
What to look for in a replacement
The easiest way to end up unhappy with your next tool is to pick another one that asks for the same manual work. Before you compare features, check these three things.
1. Does it file things for you? The core problem with a growing manual board is that every save requires a decision. A good replacement either removes that decision (by organizing tabs automatically) or makes it irrelevant (by not asking you to file anything long term). If a tool's main organizing unit is something you create and maintain by hand, expect to hit the same upkeep wall again, just later.
2. Can you find a page by what it was about? Think about how you actually look for an old tab. You rarely remember the exact title. You remember that it was a pricing page, or an article about database indexing, or a recipe with lentils. A replacement worth switching to should let you search or filter by topic or purpose, not only by whatever text the page happened to have in its title.
3. Does it hold up after a few hundred saves? Almost every tab manager looks great with twenty tabs in it. The real test is what it feels like at three hundred. Picture your library six months from now and ask whether this tool's structure would still be easy to navigate, or whether you'd be back to scrolling.
Not every tool below does all three, and that's fine. Some of them solve a different problem than Toby did, and you might find that's actually the problem you have. The "Best for" line under each one is there to help you match a tool to how you work.
Five alternatives worth considering
These five cover the main directions people take when they leave Toby: automatic organization, project workspaces, session saving, automatic tab closing, and simply using what's already built into Chrome.
Tab Folio
Tab Folio is an AI tab manager for Chrome (and yes, it's ours, so weigh this section accordingly). When you save a tab, the AI reads the page and labels it automatically, by category and by purpose, so you never have to decide which collection a tab belongs in. You can save the current tab, or every tab in the window at once, which Tab Folio stores together as a session you can restore later.
If the automatic labels don't match how you think, Custom Collections let you define your own categories in plain language, and the AI sorts new tabs into them for you. Your saved tabs live in a dashboard where you can search by title, URL or any of those labels. If you keep notes in Notion, Notion Sync can send saved tabs to a Notion database automatically.
Best for: people who left Toby because of the filing and upkeep, and want the organizing done for them.
Workona
Workona organizes your browser around workspaces. You create a workspace for each project, and the tabs for that project live inside it, so you can switch from one project's set of tabs to another's.
That model is a good fit if your work divides cleanly into distinct projects and you want your open tabs to change when you switch context. The workspaces themselves are something you set up and decide on, so if what wore you down in Toby was designing and maintaining the structure, think about whether workspaces would feel different for you.
Best for: people who juggle a handful of clearly separated projects and want to switch between them as whole sets of tabs.
Session Buddy
Session Buddy focuses on saving and restoring browser sessions: the set of windows and tabs you have open at a given moment. You can save your current session and bring it back later, which makes it useful as a safety net and for returning to a whole working setup at once.
It approaches the problem from a different angle than Toby. Instead of curating a board of individual tabs, you're working with snapshots of everything you had open. If what you really wanted from Toby was "put this whole working setup away and get it back later," that might be the better fit.
Best for: people who think in whole browsing sessions rather than individual saved pages.
Tab Wrangler
Tab Wrangler solves a different problem: it automatically closes tabs you haven't used for a set amount of time, and keeps a list of the tabs it closed so you can reopen any of them.
That makes it less a place to store tabs and more a way to keep your open tab count under control without thinking about it. Some people who left Toby find that their real problem was too many open tabs, not a lack of places to save them, and that a tool which tidies up on its own is closer to what they needed.
Best for: people whose main pain is a tab bar that keeps growing, rather than organizing a long term library.
Chrome's native tab groups
Chrome has tab groups built in, with nothing to install. You can put related open tabs into a group, give the group a name and a color, and collapse it so it takes up less room in your tab bar.
Tab groups work on the tabs you have open right now, which makes them a lightweight way to keep a busy window readable. They're a good place to start if you want a little structure without adding an extension, and they pair well with a separate tool for the things you want to keep long term.
Best for: people who want light organization for open tabs with zero setup.
Moving your tabs out of Toby
Switching tools is only worth it if you can bring your saved tabs with you. Here's a practical approach that keeps the risk low.
Step 1: Keep a backup first. Before you change anything, check Toby's settings for an export option and save a copy if your version has one. Even if you never use the file, it means nothing is lost if a step goes wrong.
Step 2: Decide what's worth moving. A migration is the best chance you'll get to drop dead weight. Skim your collections and leave behind anything you haven't opened in months. Many users find that a large share of an old board is links they no longer need.
Step 3: Move one collection at a time. Open the tabs from a single collection in a fresh window. Working in batches keeps things manageable and lets you check each step before moving on.
Step 4: Save them into your new tool. In Tab Folio, open the extension and choose "Save all tabs" to save every tab in that window as a session. The AI labels each tab as it's saved, so the collection arrives already organized by category and purpose. Close the window and repeat for the next collection.
Step 5: Check, then clean up. Once everything you care about is in the new tool, spot check a few searches to make sure you can find what you expect. Only then remove your old board.
One honest note on Tab Folio's free tier: it covers 100 saved tabs per month. If you're moving a large board, either spread the migration across a couple of months or use Pro, which covers 1,000 tabs per month for $5. For more on backing up and restoring a Tab Folio library once you've moved, see our guide to exporting and importing your browser tabs.
How Tab Folio compares as a Toby alternative
Here's how Tab Folio lines up against the three criteria from earlier, without the sales pitch.
It files things for you. This is the main difference. Every tab you save is read and labelled automatically, so there's no "which collection does this go in" moment. If the default labels don't fit, Custom Collections let you describe your own categories and the AI sorts new tabs into them. If you want the details on how the labelling works, our guide to how an AI tab manager organizes your tabs walks through it.
You can find a page by what it was about. Because each tab carries labels describing its category and purpose, you can search by those labels as well as by title or URL. If you remember that a page was about pricing or a database topic but not what it was called, searching for that topic will usually surface it.
It holds up as your library grows. Since the structure comes from the labels rather than from a board you arrange by hand, adding your three hundredth tab doesn't require reorganizing anything. Sessions keep groups of tabs you saved together, and Import and Export let you keep a full backup of your library.
Where it may not suit you: if you genuinely enjoy arranging a visual board by hand, Tab Folio's dashboard is built around search and labels rather than a drag-and-drop canvas, so it will feel different. And the free tier covers 100 tabs per month, which is plenty for most people but not for saving everything you open. Tab Folio is privacy-first: no tracking, and your data is never sold.
Conclusion
The right Toby alternative depends on what wore you down: if it was the filing and upkeep, pick a tool that organizes for you; if it was something else, one of the more focused tools above may fit better.
If you want to try the automatic approach, install Tab Folio from the Chrome Web Store and save your first collection in a couple of minutes.