Tab Buddy saves, organises, and restores your tabs and native Chrome tab groups — with crash recovery, a command palette, and optional end-to-end encrypted sync. The session manager that's free forever and looks like it costs money.
works fully offline · your data stays on your device
Save whole sessions, one window, one group, or a single tab — and get back exactly what you left, groups and all.
Names, colours, collapsed state, and order come back exactly as you left them — the single thing every old session manager destroys.
One keystroke (⌘K / Ctrl+K) fuzzy-searches every open tab, saved session, and archived tab. Full keyboard navigation throughout.
Rolling automatic snapshots of all your windows, kept locally. A crash or bad Chrome update never costs you anything.
Optional sync across devices with client-side encryption. The server stores ciphertext — we can't read your tabs even if we wanted to.
Find tabs by what the page looked like with local thumbnails, or fly through a keyboard-first dense list. One toggle.
Group every window by site or by time opened. Find and close duplicates. Sweep stale tabs into a session. Deterministic — no AI, no cloud.
Imports OneTab, Session Buddy, Toby, and bookmarks exports on day one. Your history comes with you.
Export everything to JSON, CSV, Markdown, or HTML any time. Your data is yours — that's the whole point.
No subscription, no "Pro" tier, no bait-and-switch. Sync costs us pennies by design. If Tab Buddy saves your day, there's a Ko-fi.
Tab Buddy is local-first: everything lives in your browser. If you turn on sync, your sessions are encrypted on your device with a passphrase that never leaves it. The server is a dumb store of ciphertext.
Really free. Tab Buddy stores your data in your own browser, and sync uses client-side encryption on infrastructure that costs pennies at any scale — so there's no cost that would force a subscription. If it saves your bacon, you can leave a tip on Ko-fi.
Nobody can recover it — not even us. That's the trade for genuine end-to-end encryption. Your local data is unaffected; you'd just set up a fresh sync with a new passphrase and your sessions re-upload. Store the passphrase in your password manager when you set it up.
Yes — names, colours, collapsed state, and order, on both save and restore. This is the gap that made us build Tab Buddy: the older session managers flatten your groups into a plain list.
Yes. Paste or drop your export on the Import page and it comes across — Toby lists even become named tab groups. There's an import step right in the welcome flow.
Capturing a preview of a page needs Chrome's "read all sites" permission — there is no narrower one. That's exactly why thumbnails are off by default and opt-in: everything else works without it, and the captures never leave your device either way.