Install Bookmend free — works with your existing Chrome bookmarks, no migration needed
For the quick summary of how Bookmend and Toby compare, see the Bookmend vs Toby summary page. This post goes deeper — covering what Toby actually does (verified from the current product), where it genuinely overlaps with Bookmend, and where it doesn’t. The short version: these tools aren’t really competitors.
The Core Use Case Difference
Toby is a tab session manager. Its fundamental job is: save your currently open tabs into a named group, close them to free up memory, and restore the whole group later. You use Toby while actively working across multiple projects — it’s forward-looking and operational.
Bookmend is a Chrome bookmark repair kit. Its fundamental job is: scan your existing Chrome bookmarks, identify which ones have dead links, and help you recover those dead pages via the Wayback Machine. You use Bookmend to maintain an accumulated collection — it’s backward-looking and remedial.
These are different jobs at different time horizons:
- Toby helps you manage what’s open right now and tomorrow
- Bookmend helps you maintain what you saved over the past few years
What Toby Actually Does
Toby is a Chrome extension (Chrome-only, no mobile app) that replaces Chrome’s new-tab page with a visual dashboard.
Tab collections: Save all your open tabs in the current window as a named collection. Name it “Client X project,” “Research: article ideas,” or “Shopping.” The saved group appears as a card on Toby’s dashboard.
Session restore: Click any collection to restore all those tabs at once — Chrome reopens each URL.
Organization: Arrange collections in columns. Group related collections together. The dashboard is your workspace overview.
Sync: Collections sync across Chrome installations (Toby account required).
Team features: Paid plans enable shared collections — team members can see and restore the same saved tab groups. This is used by teams for sharing research, onboarding materials, or shared project resources.
Current free tier limits: As of 2026, Toby’s free tier is capped at 60 saved tabs total. The Productivity plan ($4.50/month) removes this limit. Toby is actively maintained — version 1.13.1 was released June 2026.
What Toby is not designed for:
- Long-term archival of thousands of bookmarks
- Detecting or recovering dead links
- Searching inside saved page content
- Working with Chrome’s native bookmark folder
What Bookmend Actually Does
Bookmend is a Chrome extension that works alongside Chrome’s native bookmarks (not Toby’s collections).
Dead-link detection: Monitors your Chrome bookmarks and flags pages that have gone offline. Confirms each failure twice, 48 hours apart, to avoid false positives from temporary outages.
Wayback Machine recovery: For confirmed dead bookmarks, finds the closest Wayback Machine snapshot to the date you originally saved the link. One click opens the archived version.
Full-text search: Search the content of every bookmarked page, not just titles and URLs. This is free and works on your existing Chrome bookmarks.
Duplicate and folder cleanup: Identifies duplicate bookmarks and empty folders.
Local-first: Core features run in your browser, nothing uploaded.
No account required: Reads your existing Chrome bookmarks immediately on install.
What Bookmend doesn’t do:
- Manage or organize open tab sessions
- Replace Chrome’s new-tab page
- Work with Toby’s saved collections
- Offer visual tile views or tagging systems
Feature Comparison
| Feature | Toby | Bookmend |
|---|---|---|
| Tab session saving | Yes | No |
| New-tab page replacement | Yes | No |
| Team tab sharing | Paid | No |
| Dead-link detection | No | Yes |
| Wayback Machine recovery | No | Yes |
| Full-text bookmark search | No | Yes |
| Works with Chrome bookmarks | No (own system) | Yes (native) |
| Mobile app | No | No |
| Browser support | Chrome only | Chrome, Brave, Edge, Arc, Opera |
| Account required | Yes | No |
| Cross-device sync | Yes (account) | Pro tier |
| Free tier limit | 60 saved tabs | Unlimited bookmarks |
| Cost | Free (limited) / $4.50/mo+ | Free |
Chrome’s Built-In Tab Groups: Context for Toby
Before adopting Toby, it’s worth knowing what Chrome offers natively for tab organization. Chrome introduced Tab Groups in 2020 and has continued developing the feature. As of Chrome 130+, built-in Tab Groups include:
- Color-coded groupings: Assign a name and color to any group of tabs. The group appears as a labeled strip above those tabs in the tab bar.
- Collapsing: Click a group label to collapse it, hiding all tabs in that group from the tab strip without closing them — they stay loaded in memory.
- Saved Tab Groups: Chrome can save Tab Groups persistently. Close a saved group and reopen it later from the bookmarks bar dropdown or the Tab Groups panel.
The key difference from Toby: Chrome’s native Tab Groups are functional but lack a dedicated management interface. You can save groups, but viewing, organizing, and switching between multiple saved groups requires clicking through the bookmarks bar or a limited panel. Toby provides a full-screen visual workspace dashboard where all saved collections are visible at once, with columns, team sharing on paid plans, and a purpose-built UI for session management.
For users who need to save 2-3 tab groups occasionally, Chrome’s native Tab Groups may be sufficient at no cost. For power users managing complex multi-project workflows across many sessions, Toby’s dedicated interface is more capable. This is worth knowing because many users discover they don’t need Toby’s full capabilities — Chrome’s built-in feature already does enough for their use case.
What Happens When Saved Toby Collections Go Stale
Toby does not monitor whether URLs in saved collections are still live. A tab you save to Toby today may fail to load in three months if the page was deleted, the site changed its URL structure, the service went offline, or the domain expired.
Toby’s dashboard will still show the saved tab with its original title and favicon, with no indication the link is dead. You only discover the problem when you try to restore the session and the tab fails to load.
This is not unique to Toby — most tab managers have the same behavior, and for short-lived active-work sessions it matters relatively little. The issue becomes more significant for longer-term saves: reference materials in Toby that you plan to return to in weeks or months have meaningful risk of containing dead links when you come back to them.
One workflow some users adopt as a result: once a project wraps up and its Toby collection transitions from “active work” to “reference material,” they migrate the key URLs into Chrome’s native bookmarks. At that point, Bookmend takes over long-term monitoring of those links. The handoff from Toby (session manager for current work) to Chrome bookmarks plus Bookmend (long-term archive with health monitoring) is a natural separation by time horizon.
Where They Could Overlap (and Don’t)
The only conceptual overlap: both tools save links to pages you might want to return to. Toby saves open tabs into a session; Bookmend maintains your Chrome bookmarks.
But in practice, these are different types of saves:
- Toby saves are active, current, meant to be revisited soon — today’s work, this week’s research
- Chrome bookmark saves are long-term archives — articles you want to reference later, tools you might need, references you’re not using right now
Because they operate on separate data (Toby’s own collection system vs Chrome’s native bookmark folder), there’s no technical conflict and no data overlap. Using both is natural.
The Honest Case Against Each
When Toby might not be enough: If you regularly save tabs to Toby and those tabs go dead before you restore them, Toby won’t warn you or help you recover. It also won’t search inside page content to help you find what you saved by subject. If your main frustration is links dying and content disappearing, Toby doesn’t address that.
When Bookmend might not be enough: If your main frustration is context-switching between projects — losing track of what tabs were open for each thing you’re working on — Bookmend doesn’t help with that. Bookmend doesn’t manage sessions or replace the new-tab page.
When to Start with Toby vs Bookmend
Start with Toby if:
- Your main frustration is context-switching between projects throughout the day — you keep losing track of which tabs belong to which thing you’re working on
- You regularly have 20+ tabs open simultaneously across multiple unrelated topics
- You want a visual workspace dashboard rather than a standard browser tab strip
- You work with a team and want to share tab collections for onboarding, research, or shared project resources
- You’re comfortable with the 60-tab free tier limit and willing to upgrade if you need more
Start with Bookmend if:
- You have a large existing Chrome bookmark collection (hundreds or thousands of bookmarks) that has become hard to search or maintain
- You’ve clicked a saved bookmark and found it dead, with no way to recover the content
- You want dead-link monitoring and recovery that runs automatically on your existing saved pages, not just new saves
- You want zero account creation or migration: install Bookmend and it works on your existing Chrome bookmarks immediately
Use both if:
- You manage active multi-project sessions daily (Toby’s job) and also maintain a long-term reference collection in Chrome bookmarks (Bookmend’s job)
- The combination costs nothing additional: Bookmend is free, and Toby’s free tier covers basic session management
The clearest signal that you need Toby specifically: you open Chrome and are immediately overwhelmed by how many unrelated tabs are open at once. The clearest signal that you need Bookmend specifically: you’ve tried to find a bookmarked page and either couldn’t because title search didn’t work, or found the link dead with no path to recovery.
Can You Use Both?
Yes, easily. They’re complementary by nature.
A typical pattern: Toby handles your active work sessions — when you’re deep in a project with 8 tabs open, you save them as a Toby collection at the end of the day. Chrome bookmarks handle permanent references — when you find something worth keeping long-term, Ctrl+D. Bookmend keeps the Chrome bookmark collection healthy — detecting dead links as they accumulate over months and years.
None of these tools step on each other. They have different inputs (Toby’s collections, Chrome’s native bookmarks), different jobs (session management vs bookmark maintenance), and different time horizons.
Install Bookmend free from the Chrome Web Store — no account required, works with your existing Chrome bookmarks immediately.
Frequently asked questions
Toby is a Chrome extension that replaces the new-tab page with a visual dashboard for organizing tab groups. You save a set of open tabs into a named collection, close them, and restore the whole group later. It's designed for people managing multiple projects simultaneously who want to save and switch between tab sessions without keeping everything open at once.
Toby has a free tier, but it is now limited to 60 saved tabs total. The paid Productivity plan starts at $4.50/month and removes this limit. Toby is Chrome-only.
No. Toby doesn't monitor whether the URLs in your saved tab groups have gone dead. If a page in one of your Toby collections goes offline, Toby won't flag it — you'd only find out when you try to restore that tab. Bookmend provides dead-link detection and recovery for Chrome bookmarks; Toby's collections are a separate system.
No. Bookmend works with Chrome's native bookmark folder. Toby's saved tab collections are stored in Toby's own system, separate from Chrome's bookmarks. Bookmend doesn't scan or manage Toby collections.
Yes, and it's a natural combination. Toby manages your active, in-progress tab sessions — the research you're doing right now, the project you'll return to tomorrow. Bookmend manages your long-term Chrome bookmark collection — the thousands of links you've saved over years that need monitoring and occasional repair. They operate on different data sets and don't conflict.
Toby collections are temporary-to-medium-term saves of tab groups you're actively working with — they're meant to be restored and used. Chrome bookmarks are longer-term references you save once and may not return to for weeks or years. The use cases are different: Toby is for session management, Chrome bookmarks are for archiving useful pages.
Not exactly — it replaces the new-tab page and adds session-based tab saving. Most Toby users still use Chrome bookmarks for long-term saves. Toby is more complementary than a replacement.
Depends on the type of content. Toby is better for saving active research sessions — groups of tabs you're currently working with. Chrome bookmarks (managed by Bookmend) are better for long-term archival of specific pages. For visually organized, tagged long-term collections, Raindrop.io is a third option worth considering.
No. Toby is Chrome-only and has no mobile app. The new-tab page replacement only works in Chrome on desktop. Bookmend works in Chrome and other Chromium browsers — Brave, Edge, Arc, and Opera — but neither tool has a mobile app.
Yes, Toby syncs your saved collections across Chrome installations on different devices. The free tier has sync included. Bookmend's Pro tier adds cross-device sync for bookmark health data; the free tier is local to the current device.
The free tier is capped at 60 saved tabs. If you have more than 60 saved tabs when you downgrade, Toby may limit access to excess collections until the count is within the free tier limit.
Yes. Chrome's native Tab Groups (introduced in Chrome 80, expanded in Chrome 130+) let you group open tabs with color labels, collapse groups to hide them without closing them, and save groups for later restoration. For users who need basic session organization, Chrome's built-in Tab Groups may be sufficient without installing Toby. Toby adds a dedicated visual workspace dashboard, team sharing on paid plans, and a more organized multi-collection overview that Chrome's built-in feature does not match.
Toby does not provide dead-link recovery. If a URL in a Toby collection no longer loads, your options are: (1) check the Wayback Machine manually at web.archive.org — paste the dead URL and look for a snapshot near the date you saved it; (2) search for the page title or a phrase you remember in a search engine to find mirrors or discussions; (3) check archive.today (archive.ph) for a user-submitted snapshot. Bookmend automates Wayback Machine recovery but only for Chrome bookmarks, not Toby collections.
