Workona
+ all Chromium The important thing they share
Both Duotang and Workona implement genuine workspace architecture: tabs stay alive across workspace switches. Your Gmail draft, Notion page state, video position, and WebSocket connections survive every switch in both tools.
This puts them in a small category. Most extensions that call themselves "workspace managers" are actually tab lists — they save URLs and destroy and recreate tabs on every switch, losing all working state. If you're evaluating either Duotang or Workona, you're already in the right category. The question is which one fits your situation.
Pricing and account
Duotang is free with no account required. All data stays on your device. There's no sign-up flow, no email, no password.
Workona organizes tabs into named spaces (what Duotang calls workspaces). Workona's free tier is capped at 5 spaces — a hard limit that power users hit quickly. Full use requires a Pro subscription at around $7–8/month billed annually. Team features are higher per seat. Workona requires creating an account even for free use.
For individual users who don't need cross-device sync or team collaboration, Duotang covers everything Workona's free tier does and more, with no account and no cost.
Privacy and data storage
Workona syncs workspace contents — including every tab URL you have open — to their cloud servers. This is what enables cross-device sync and team features, but it means a third party holds a continuous record of your browsing context. For users in legal, healthcare, finance, or any role with confidentiality requirements, this is worth considering.
Duotang is local-first: all workspace data, history, clippings, and notes stay on the device. Nothing is transmitted to any server. There's no backend to breach, no account to compromise, and no data to subpoena.
Workspace navigation
Workona uses a pinned tab at the far left of every window — the workona.com tab — as its control surface. Switching workspaces means clicking that tab, selecting the new workspace, then clicking back to where you were — three clicks. With Duotang, one. It occupies a permanent slot in your tab bar.
Duotang uses a sidebar injected directly into every page. No tab is consumed by the extension. The rail slides in from the edge of whatever page you're on and stays out of the tab bar entirely.
Features beyond workspaces
Workona focuses on workspace management, with integrations for team tools like Slack, Notion, and Google Drive, and basic notes and task lists scoped per workspace.
Both have tab search, but they work differently. Workona's search is global — results come from all workspaces at once. Duotang's Find & Switch is workspace-scoped by default, so searching in your "Work" workspace only surfaces tabs and history from that context. You can search across all workspaces when you need to, but the default keeps results relevant to where you are.
Duotang also adds content-aware features that Workona doesn't have:
- Highlights — select any text on any page and get contextual actions: addresses open in Maps, prices convert currency, temperatures convert units, images convert format or resize, all without opening a new tab
- Search+ — overlays workspace context onto Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Brave Search results, showing which workspace you previously visited each result from
- Peek — open any link in an inline overlay without leaving the current page, with Reader mode for articles
- Per-workspace downloads — downloads are scoped and searchable by workspace, name, date, and file type
- Workbench — a Chrome Side Panel with per-workspace notes, clippings, and code snippets
When Workona is the better choice
- You need cross-device sync — Duotang is local-first only
- You're on a team that needs shared workspaces and collaboration features
- You want integrations with Slack, Notion, and other work tools baked in
- You use Firefox — Workona supports Firefox, Duotang is Chromium-only
When Duotang is the better choice
- You want a free, no-account genuine workspace manager
- You have privacy or confidentiality requirements and can't have tab URLs synced to a third party
- You want content-aware features — Highlights, Search+, Peek — beyond workspace switching
- You work primarily on one device and don't need cross-device sync
Try Duotang free — no account, no cost, installs in seconds.
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