Best Session Manager Extensions for Chrome

Best Session Manager Extensions for Chrome

Are you tired of losing your open tabs and browser sessions every time your computer crashes or you accidentally close your browser? A session manager extension for Chrome can help you save and restore your tabs, making it easy to pick up where you left off.

In this article, we will be discussing the top session manager extensions for Chrome that can help you save and restore your tabs and browser sessions.

Comparisons and Ranking

1. Partizion

‍Partizion is a chrome session manager extension popular with people for it’s ease of use, customizability, and productivity features.

Partizion’s Session Manager is one of the most advanced and reliable Session Managers for chrome. The extension allows you to save and close a session in one click or with a hotkey and you can enable automatic cloud backups and syncing so that your sessions are automatically saved and available anywhere.

To reduce clutter, you can also configure Partizion to automatically delete sessions after a certain amount of time.

Partizion is committed to security and privacy, and has built a very robust, dependable session manager.

Pros

• Sessions backed up and synced to the cloud
• Very reliable: will save sessions even if chrome crashes, your computer crashes, or you accidentally close a window without saving
• Nice UI, dark mode, very configurable

Cons

• Not free

2. Session Buddy

Session Buddy is a popular session manager extension for Chrome that allows you to save and restore your open tabs and browser sessions. It also allows you to organize your sessions into folders, making it easy to find and restore a specific session. With Session Buddy, you can easily export and import your sessions, making it easy to migrate to or from the extension.

Pros

• Very simple to use
• See and manage all open tabs in one place

Cons

• Last updated over 2 years ago
• No cloud backups or syncing

3. Session Manager (That’s the actual name of the extension)

‍Session Manager is super simple extension for manually saving sessions. You can import/export, add or remove tabs right from the chrome extension popup. Overall, Session Manager is a useful tool for anyone who wants a simple and efficient way to manage their browsing sessions and work more productively in Chrome.

Pros

• Simple
• Adding/Removing tabs is easy

Cons

• Last updated in 2016
• No syncing or cloud backups
• Gets very crowded after 4-5 sessions

4. OneTab

‍OneTab is a Chrome extension that helps users better manage and organize their open tabs. With OneTab, users can easily consolidate all their open tabs into a single list, making it easier to keep track of what's open and reducing memory usage in the browser.

OneTab also includes features for managing and organizing saved tabs, such as the ability to group tabs into custom sets and easily restore them at any time. Users can also export their saved tabs as a list, making it easy to share them or save them for later.

Pros

• One click save tabs
• Probably the simplest session manager

Cons

• Not very reliable
• Many sources have reported on the poor reliability and tab loss of OneTab
• No syncing

5. Workona

‍Workona is a Chrome extension designed to help users organize and manage their web browsing activities more effectively. With Workona, users can group their tabs together into workspaces, allowing them to easily switch between different projects or tasks with just a few clicks. Each workspace can be customized with a specific name, color, and icon, and users can also add notes or tasks to each workspace to help keep track of their progress.

Pros

• Has notes and tasks
• Can share with your team
• Suspends tabs

Cons

• Potential slowdowns: Workona may consume more system resources than some other extensions, which could slow down browsing performance on older or less powerful devices
• No sessions feature,  no automatic or cloud backed up sessions
• Workona has a unique tab suspending / grouping strategy that is a bit jarring and doesn’t work for everyone

6. Tab Session Manager

Tab Session Manager is a simple session manager extension for Chrome that allows you to save sessions into tree like structures. You can add tags to organize your saved tabs, and restore sessions from the extension popup.

Pros

• Has Firefox and Edge Versions
• The extension popup squishes everything into a window so you can manager everything from there
• Support tree style tabs

Cons

• Not very reliable

7. TabsOutliner

Tabs Outliner is a Chrome extension that helps users better organize and manage their open tabs. With Tabs Outliner, users can create a tree-like hierarchy of their tabs, allowing them to group related tabs together and easily navigate through them.

Users can also save and restore different tab sets, allowing them to switch between different projects or workspaces with ease. Tabs Outliner also includes a search function to quickly find specific tabs, as well as options to sort and filter tabs based on various criteria.

Pros

• Window manager with all open and saved windows / tabs
• Very easy to restore tabs after chrome crashes

Cons

• Only saves tabs that are manually saved
• Lots of bugs, very little support or maintenance
• Outdated UI

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Benefits of using a session Manager

Using a Session Manager extension for chrome has many benefits. Most people hoard tabs and end up with multiple windows with way too many tabs in them. The reason for this is that we are worried that if we close tabs, we won’t be able to find or restore them again.

Session Managers help you safely close tabs or whole sessions without worrying about losing them forever. You can quickly open and restore sessions and pickup where you left off, without all the clutter of having every important tab open all at once.

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Tab Manager vs. Session Manager

There are many names for chrome tab extensions, two of the most popular are Tab Managers and Session Managers.

A Chrome Tab Manager is generally a chrome extension that helps you manage your tabs in the browser; opening, closing, and organizing tabs.

A Chrome Session Manager is generally a chrome extension that helps you save and restore groups of tabs, or sessions.

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Cloud Session Manager vs. Local Storage Session Manager

Session Managers with cloud backups or syncing make your session’s available anywhere and anytime, rather than just saving the sessions on one device.

A local Chrome Session Manager, often advertised as just a Session Manager, saves your sessions to your local device or browser meaning that they are only available on that device. This also means that a local Session Manager is susceptible to chrome or computer crashes, and often results in tab loss and losing all of your previous sessions.

Whereas a Cloud Synced Session Manager backs up your sessions to the cloud so that they are available on any device, and are not nearly as susceptible to chrome crashes or computer crashes.

*Notably, Partizion uses a local cache and cloud backups to reliably and consistently save sessions — even if chrome crashes or your computer shuts down.

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Conclusion

In conclusion, the above-mentioned session manager extensions for Chrome are some of the best options available that can help you save and restore your open tabs and browser sessions. Each of these extensions has its own set of features and capabilities, so it's important to choose the one that best fits your needs.

If you want the most reliable, secure, and easy to use Session Manager for Chrome, we suggest Partizion.

If you’re looking for a free and simple session manager, and don’t care as much about reliability or cloud syncing / cloud backups, we recommend Session Buddy.

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