OneTab
What OneTab actually does
OneTab has one job: click the extension icon and every open tab collapses into a single list of links. Chrome closes those tabs, freeing their memory. You get a tidy list you can restore one tab at a time or all at once. That's it.
It's not a workspace manager. There's no concept of named groups, switching between contexts, or keeping work in progress. It's a parking lot — tabs go in, tabs come out, and what happened in between (scroll position, form state, active sessions) is gone.
What Duotang actually does
Duotang organizes tabs into named workspaces that stay loaded in the background. Switching workspaces doesn't close anything — it hides your current workspace's tabs and shows another set. The tab you had open this morning is the same tab this afternoon. Nothing reloads.
The reason this matters: most of the tools people work in daily — Notion, Gmail, ChatGPT, Linear, Figma, GitHub — live in JavaScript memory, not just a URL. Reloading them from a link gives you a blank document, an empty inbox, a closed conversation. Duotang avoids all of that.
They're not really competing
OneTab and Duotang answer different questions. OneTab answers "I have too many tabs open right now and need to clear them." Duotang answers "I need to switch between projects without losing my work." Those are separate problems.
Some people use both. Duotang handles the workspaces you actively switch between. OneTab handles overflow — tabs you want to hold onto but don't need loaded. That's a reasonable setup if you find yourself accumulating tabs outside your workspaces.
When OneTab is the right choice
- You want to clear all open tabs and reclaim memory in one click
- You need to share a set of links with someone — OneTab can generate a public URL
- You don't need persistent workspaces, just a way to park URLs temporarily
- You want something with essentially zero learning curve
When Duotang is the right choice
- You want context switches that don't lose your work — drafts, scroll position, active sessions
- You work across multiple projects and need named workspaces you can switch between instantly
- You work in SPAs — Notion, Gmail, ChatGPT, Figma — where reloading from a URL means starting over
- You want your tabs to always be current, with no manual save step
Keep your tabs alive across every project switch — free, no account.
Install Duotang