Saves tabs as a list of links. Switching closes your current tabs and opens a new set.
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OneTab 
Toby 
Tab-Pilot Snapshots your open tabs for crash recovery. Not designed for daily switching.
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Session Buddy 
Tab Session Manager Suspends idle tabs to free up memory. Chrome's built-in Memory Saver covers most use cases.
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The Marvellous Suspender 
Auto Tab Discard Tabs stay alive across every switch. Your work is always right where you left it.
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Workona Workspace features built into the browser itself. Requires switching away from Chrome.
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Arc 
Vivaldi 
Sidekick The key difference: what happens to your tabs
This is the most important thing to understand before choosing either tool.
Toby is a tab list. Collections are saved sets of pages. When you open a Toby collection, each page loads fresh from scratch. When you "park" a tab, it closes — Toby remembers the address, but the tab is gone. Every context switch closes your current tabs and reopens a new set. Anything you were in the middle of — a half-written email, a video, an AI conversation — doesn't survive.
Workona is a genuine workspace manager. Workona's Spaces automatically manage tab visibility — switching to a Space hides your current tabs and shows the tabs for that Space, all without closing or reloading anything. The tab you had open this morning is the same tab this afternoon — same scroll position, same form data, right where you left it. Switching workspaces moves you, not the tabs.
If you're choosing between them primarily because of the "workspace" language both use — that's the distinction that matters most.
When to choose Toby
Toby's strength is as a visual "save for later" tool. If you mainly want to collect tabs you'll come back to eventually — research links, reading lists, reference tabs — Toby's dashboard is genuinely pleasant to use. The free tier covers light use, collections sync across devices, and you can share collections with a team.
Toby breaks down for daily workflow switching. If you're working in Notion, Gmail, ChatGPT, Linear, or Figma and need to switch contexts dozens of times a day, tab recreation on every switch is a constant source of lost work. That's not what Toby is designed for.
When to choose Workona
Workona is the right choice when tabs staying alive actually matters — when you're switching between projects multiple times a day and need everything to be exactly where you left it.
Workona also wins on team features: shared spaces, real-time collaboration, integrations with Slack, Notion, and Google Drive. For teams that genuinely work in multiple project contexts simultaneously, Workona's Team plan is purpose-built for that.
The main friction: Workona requires an account, syncs your browsing to their cloud, and gates full use behind a $7/month Pro subscription. The free tier is limited to 5 spaces.
Both require an account and cloud sync
One thing Toby and Workona share: both require you to create an account, and both sync your data to their servers. For most users that's fine. For anyone in a role with confidentiality requirements — legal, healthcare, finance — it's worth noting that both tools hold a record of your browsing context on their infrastructure.
There's a third option
If you want genuine workspace architecture (tabs stay alive, like Workona) but without the account, cloud sync, or subscription — Duotang is free, local-first, and requires no account. It's the only other Chrome extension that implements genuine workspace architecture.