TL;DR: Session Buddy is a session library: it saves, searches and restores tabs after you close them. Tabbiy is a live cockpit: every open tab stays visible in a sidebar, auto-grouped and one click from hibernation. If your problem is losing work, Session Buddy is excellent. If your problem is the 60 tabs currently open, Tabbiy is the better fit.

"Too many tabs" is really two different problems. One is losing the tabs you meant to keep. The other is drowning in the tabs you have open right now. Session Buddy and Tabbiy solve one problem each, and they solve it well.

Session Buddy has been the reference implementation of the first problem for over 15 years: save a window, close it, restore it later exactly as it was. Tabbiy attacks the second problem: put every open tab in a vertical sidebar, group it automatically, and unload the ones you are not using without hiding them.

This comparison is about which problem you actually have.

The Core Difference: Library vs Cockpit

Session Buddy is a place you go. You open its dashboard, save the current window as a session, search your collections, or restore a session from last Friday. When you are done, you close the dashboard and go back to browsing. The extension is an archive with a very good search box.

Tabbiy is a place you stay. Its sidebar is open while you browse, listing every tab in the current window. Groups are created as you open tabs, idle groups can be hibernated, and the tabs you need are one click or one keyboard shortcut away. The extension is a control surface, not an archive.

That difference explains almost every feature gap below. Session Buddy optimizes for capture and recovery. Tabbiy optimizes for ongoing control.

What Session Buddy Does Well

Session Buddy's feature set is deep, and it is worth being specific about why people like it.

  • Session save and restore that respects context. It restores tabs to their original windows, or consolidates them into a single window or the current window. Window positions, pinned tabs and incognito states come back with the session.
  • A timeline, not just a save button. Session Buddy keeps a history of your tabs at different points in time, so you can recover tabs after a crash, resurrect closed tabs long after Chrome's "Recent tabs" list has forgotten them, and find "that one site from last Friday afternoon."
  • One dashboard for every open tab. It shows all tabs across windows, with instant filtering, the ability to close related tabs in one click, and the ability to copy tabs as links, Markdown, CSV or JSON.
  • Collections for bookmarks. Saved links can be organized into color-coded collections with duplicate detection, which makes it a bookmark manager as well as a session manager.
  • Unified search. Search spans open tabs, collections and tab history, with advanced query syntax and match highlighting.
  • Import and export in 15+ formats. Plain text, links, JSON, CSV, Markdown, HTML and more, plus paste-in import with automatic URL extraction.
  • Local-first and account-free. Data is stored on your device, there is no login, no ads and no tracking, and the site says it has been trusted by millions of users for over 15 years.
  • Backups. Automatic backups plus a one-click manual backup of the whole library.

If you have ever closed a window by accident and lost a research session, that list is the reason Session Buddy has lasted.

Where Session Buddy Stops

None of these are bugs. They are the cost of being a session archive rather than a live manager.

It is a destination, not a sidebar

Session Buddy is a dashboard page. To see what is open, you leave the page you are reading and open the dashboard. To switch to a tab, you go back to the browser's tab strip or use the dashboard. There is no persistent vertical list beside your content.

For someone who manages tabs a few times a day, that is fine. For someone who lives in 60 tabs, the extra context switch is the whole problem.

No auto-grouping and no custom rules

Session Buddy can save tabs into sessions and collections, but it does not group open tabs by domain, path, subdomain or keyword. Every grouping decision is manual. If your tabs span three projects and two clients, you are the one sorting them.

No hibernation

This is the biggest workflow difference. Session Buddy frees memory by saving tabs and closing them. That is effective, but the tabs disappear from the browser. To get one back, you restore it, then close it again when you are done.

Tabbiy's hibernation unloads a tab's process while keeping its entry visible in the sidebar. The tab is still there, still clickable, still in its group, but it is not using renderer memory. You get the memory benefit without turning your working set into an archive.

Session-centric, not tab-centric

Session Buddy is excellent at "restore what I had." It is less suited to "help me work with what I have." Live filtering, switching and group management across currently open tabs are not its job.

How Tabbiy Handles the Same Jobs

A live sidebar instead of a dashboard

Tabbiy runs in Chrome's side panel. Press Alt+D and every tab in the window is listed vertically, with full titles, favicons, groups and search. You can collapse groups, reorder tabs, close duplicates and switch tabs without leaving the page you are reading.

Auto-grouping and rule-based organization

New tabs are grouped by domain automatically. For finer control, custom rules match paths, subdomains, second-level domains and keywords. Free includes one custom rule; Pro includes three. This is the feature Session Buddy does not attempt, and it is the one that keeps a large tab set organized without daily maintenance. See the auto-grouping guide for how the matching works.

Hibernation: free RAM without closing

Hibernated tabs stay visible in the sidebar but unload their processes. Click one and it reloads with its URL, title and group intact. This is the middle ground between "open and heavy" and "closed and gone" that neither Session Buddy nor OneTab offers. The memory guide covers when hibernation helps and when it does not.

Session save and restore

Tabbiy saves tabs to a staging list and restores them in one click, surviving Chrome restarts, crashes and machine reboots. It is not a timeline: it does not keep a rolling history of every tab you had open at 3 p.m. last Thursday. Session Buddy is stronger there.

Search, switch and export

The sidebar has quick search, Alt+E cycles through recent tabs, and saved tabs export as JSON (free) or CSV, HTML and Markdown (Pro). Session Buddy still wins on export breadth and on searching across bookmarks and history.

Privacy and account model

Both tools are local-first and require no account. Tabbiy stores tab and group data on your machine; Session Buddy stores sessions, collections and history on your machine. Neither is a cloud sync service. If you need tabs on multiple devices, neither tool is the answer.

Feature Comparison Table

CapabilitySession BuddyTabbiyPrimary modelSession archive + tab dashboardLive vertical sidebarAlways-visible tab listNo (dashboard page)Yes (side panel)Auto-group by domainNoYesCustom grouping rulesNoYes (path, subdomain, 2LD, keyword)Hibernation without closingNoYesSave and restore sessionsYesYesRestore window positions / pinned / incognitoYesNot advertisedTab history timelineYesNoBookmark collectionsYesNoUnified search across tabs/bookmarks/historyYesSearch within sidebarImport/export formats15+JSON (free), CSV/HTML/Markdown (Pro)Duplicate tab handlingClose related tabsClose duplicate tabsAccount requiredNoNoCloud syncNoNoData locationOn-deviceOn-devicePriceNo subscription advertised (donation-supported)Free core; Pro $2.99/month

Memory: Two Ways to Free RAM

It is tempting to ask which tool "saves more memory." The honest answer is that they unload different things at different times.

Session Buddy frees memory when you save a session, because saving closes the tabs. A closed tab has no renderer process, so the saving can be large. The trade-off is that the tab is no longer in your browser; it is in the library.

Tabbiy frees memory when you hibernate a tab or a group. The tab stays in the sidebar, but its renderer process is unloaded until you click it. The saving is similar per tab, and the tab remains part of your working set.

Neither tool can free memory from tabs you leave open and active. If you want a rough estimate of what your current tab count costs, the Chrome tab memory calculator and the 2026 RAM benchmarks are the place to start. The sidebar itself has a small overhead, as any extension does.

Which Should You Choose?

Choose Session Buddy if:

  • Your main fear is losing a session, not managing one
  • You want a searchable timeline of tabs and a bookmark collection system
  • You regularly restore windows with pinned tabs and incognito tabs intact
  • You need many export formats
  • You are happy to open a dashboard when you need to manage tabs

Choose Tabbiy if:

  • You keep 30 to 100 tabs open and want them visible in a sidebar
  • You want domain-based auto-grouping and custom rules instead of manual sorting
  • You want to hibernate idle tabs without closing them
  • You switch tabs by keyboard and want Alt+E and Alt+D
  • You want a local, account-free tool with a free core and a cheap Pro tier

Can you use both? Technically yes, but they overlap in save-and-restore behavior. Two tools that close and restore tabs can fight over the same windows, and debugging that is not worth it. Pick one as your primary workflow. If you need an archive for old research, use Session Buddy for that narrow job and keep Tabbiy as the daily driver.

If your priority is pure memory relief with the simplest possible list, our Tabbiy vs OneTab comparison covers the other end of the spectrum. If you are still deciding whether you need an extension at all, Chrome vertical tabs vs Tabbiy explains what the built-in sidebar does and does not do.

How to Try Tabbiy Without Losing Your Session Buddy Archive

  1. Install Tabbiy from the Chrome Web Store.
  2. Press Alt+D to open the sidebar and let auto-grouping sort the current window.
  3. Hibernate one idle group and click a tab to confirm it reloads with its title and group intact.
  4. Save a session from the sidebar, then restore it to see how Tabbiy's staging list differs from Session Buddy's archive.
  5. Keep Session Buddy installed but idle for a week. If you do not open it, you have your answer.

The usage guide walks through the full save, hibernate and restore workflow, and the rules page explains how to write custom grouping rules.

FAQ

Is Session Buddy free?

Session Buddy does not advertise a subscription for its core session, collection and history features, and its site links to an optional donation page. It works without a login. Check sessionbuddy.com for the current terms before relying on it for business use.

Can Tabbiy replace Session Buddy?

For live tab management, yes: Tabbiy gives you a sidebar, auto-grouping, hibernation and session save. For deep session history, bookmark collections and timeline restore, no: Session Buddy is the more specialized archive.

Does Session Buddy have a sidebar?

No. Session Buddy lives in a dashboard page that you open when you want to save, search or restore tabs. It is not a persistent side panel that shows your open tabs while you browse.

Which one uses less memory?

Both can free RAM, but in different ways. Session Buddy saves a session and closes the tabs, so their renderer processes go away. Tabbiy hibernates a tab, which unloads its process while keeping the tab visible in the sidebar. How much you save depends on how many tabs each tool unloads.

Can I use Tabbiy and Session Buddy together?

You can install both, but they overlap. Running two tools that save, close and restore tabs can produce confusing restore behavior. Pick one as your primary tab workflow and use the other only for a specific archive job.

Next Steps