Toby’s free plan caps at 60 saved cards — a limit introduced in late 2024 that turned a lot of long-time users into alternative-shoppers. Whether a second bookmark bar is the right alternative depends on which Toby job you actually used: parking project sessions, or getting back to the same links all day. Here’s the honest split, plus how to move your collections over in one file.
What changed with Toby’s free plan?
Toby restructured its pricing around November 12, 2024 — its own help article told free users to upgrade “by November 12, 2024” or be moved onto a capped Starter plan. That’s not new news, but it’s still the reason most people land on this page, because the effects are still showing up: reviews on the Chrome Web Store and Firefox AMO through 2025–2026 are dominated by pricing frustration, mostly about a paywall in front of saving itself. (Prices and limits checked against Toby’s own pages, August 2026.)
The verified facts, straight from Toby’s pricing and help pages:
- Free “Starter” plan: up to 60 saved cards, total. (per Toby’s pricing page and Starter plan help article)
- Paid plans: Productivity is $4.50/month billed yearly ($54/yr) or $6/month billed monthly — unlimited cards, advanced search, duplicate removal. Team is $8/month billed yearly ($96/yr) or $10/month billed monthly — adds SSO, priority support, centralized billing.
- Going over the limit doesn’t delete anything. Per Toby’s own help article on downgrading to Starter, existing cards stay accessible — you just “won’t be able to add any more tabs until you reduce your total to below 60.” It’s a write-freeze, not data loss, and it’s worth being precise about that: some reviews describe it as Toby “holding data hostage,” but that’s not what Toby’s own docs describe.
- Export exists and is straightforward. Toby exports collections as JSON, HTML, or TXT (per Toby’s export help article) — the JSON export is what feeds directly into the importer below.
One number you’ll see on other comparison pages — a “3 collections / 1 workspace” cap on Toby’s free tier — doesn’t appear anywhere on Toby’s own pricing or help pages, which show no collection or space limit on Starter. It’s possible that’s a real in-product restriction Toby’s docs haven’t caught up to, or it’s a claim competitor pages are copying from each other. Either way, it’s unconfirmed, so it’s not repeated here as fact.
Toby vs. Second Bookmark Bar at a glance
| Toby | Second Bookmark Bar | |
|---|---|---|
| Model | New-tab dashboard you visit | Always-visible row above the page |
| Find a saved link | Dashboard search (advanced search is paid) | Search box in the bar itself — no tab, no dashboard |
| Right links per site | Manual — open the right collection | Auto-switch maps sites to folders; bar flips automatically |
| Where saves live | Toby’s cloud account | Chrome’s native bookmark tree |
| Free limit | 60 saved cards, total | No cap on bookmarks or folders |
| Price (paid tier) | $4.50–$10/month | €4.99/month (cloud sync + extra video folders only) |
| Save all open tabs | Yes, via sessions | Yes, one shortcut into the active folder |
| Session restore | Yes, dashboard-native | Partial — per-window active folders, not full session snapshots |
| Team sharing | Yes (Team plan) | Yes — Pro shared spaces (lighter than Toby’s SSO/billing team tools) |
| Cross-device sync | Apps + web, built in | Chrome sync free; Pro adds explicit cloud sync/shared spaces |
| Data portability | Export to JSON/HTML/TXT | Already chrome://bookmarks — nothing to export |
| Uninstall behavior | Data stays in Toby’s account | Bookmarks stay in Chrome, untouched |
What Toby is still better at
To be specific about it rather than just gesturing at “different use cases”: if you’re handing a set of curated links to a teammate who needs them formatted as a shareable workspace, if you’re running several concurrent projects each with their own tab pile that needs its own home, or if AI-assisted auto-sorting of a messy tab pile sounds more useful to you than manually filing things — Toby’s dashboard does that job, and a bookmark row doesn’t attempt to. I’m not going to pretend a second row replicates a purpose-built team collaboration tool; it isn’t one.
The paradigm cost: dashboard vs. row
The thing that actually separates these two products isn’t features — it’s where your saves live and what it costs to reach them. Toby’s collections live on the new-tab page: to get back to something, you open a new tab, land on the dashboard, and find the right card in the right collection. That’s not a big cost once — it’s a real cost fifty times a day, once for every single retrieval, because each one is a small context switch away from whatever you were doing.
A second bookmark bar sits above the page you’re already on. Reaching a folder costs one click and zero navigation, because the row was already visible the whole time. That’s the entire argument for a row instead of a dashboard: it’s not that a dashboard is worse at holding tabs, it’s that a dashboard is a destination and a row isn’t. For deep session organization and team sharing, being a destination is a feature — you want a place to go look. For “the same six things I open constantly,” being a destination is the cost you pay on every single retrieval.
Put a rough number on it: opening a new tab, waiting for the dashboard to render, and scanning for the right card is a handful of seconds you can’t really get below, however fast the dashboard is. A click on a folder that’s already sitting above the page you’re on is close to instant. That gap is trivial once. Multiply it by the number of times a day you actually go back to a saved link, and it’s the whole argument — not a dramatic one, just a real one that compounds.
That gap widens at the two moments a dashboard is slowest. One is picking the right collection before you can even start scanning — Auto-switch has already flipped the bar to the folder mapped to the site you’re on, star showing on the slot switcher, before you had to choose anything. The other is not remembering where something is — instead of opening the dashboard and searching there, the bar’s own search panel opens right on the page you’re on, with results labeled by folder and domain.
How to move your Toby collections (one JSON file)
If you’re moving off Toby and want to bring an existing setup with you rather than starting from scratch, here’s the actual process:
- Export from Toby. In Toby, go to your collections and export as JSON (Toby’s own export help article covers this) — you’ll get a file shaped like
{lists: [{title, cards: [{url, title}]}]}, or an older console-backup shape, both of which the importer recognizes. - Open Second Bookmark Bar’s Settings → Backup. Drop the exported JSON file in. The importer builds one new bookmark folder per Toby list — up to 5,000 bookmarks and 500 folders — and shows you a preview before anything is written.
- Confirm, or undo. Once you confirm, the folders land on your bar. If something looks off, there’s a one-tap undo right after the import completes, so it’s not a one-way door.
It’s a real, working importer, not a “go export to HTML and hope” workaround — though it only carries over what a link bookmark can represent, so anything Toby-specific like card notes doesn’t have anywhere to land.
Which should you pick?
If your actual pattern is project-based: you open a cluster of tabs for a specific piece of work, you want to park the whole cluster as a named thing, and you might hand that cluster to someone else — Toby’s model is built for exactly that, and a bookmark row won’t replicate its dashboard or its team features. If the 60-card free cap is what’s pushing you off Toby but this is genuinely your workflow, paying for Toby’s Productivity plan (or trying a dedicated session tool) may serve you better than switching paradigms entirely.
If your actual pattern is retrieval-based: the same handful of folders, reached constantly, all day, and what you want is to stop clicking through a dashboard to get to them — that’s the specific cost a second bar is built to remove, and if those folders are full of videos, they render as thumbnails with duration badges right on the row, so recognition there is visual too.
Some people have both patterns in the same week. I do. Toby-style session parking and an always-visible row aren’t really competing for the same job, once you look past both being extensions that touch your tabs. For the fuller version of this argument — the actual interaction-cost math behind row vs. dashboard vs. sidebar — see the full comparison, or the Raindrop comparison if a read-later library is closer to what you’re actually after.
FAQ
Is Toby still free? Yes, with limits: the free Starter plan caps at 60 saved cards. Unlimited cards require the Productivity plan, $4.50/month billed yearly ($6/month billed monthly).
What happens to my Toby collections if I don’t upgrade? Nothing is deleted. Over-limit collections stay viewable, but you can’t save any new card until your total is back under 60. It’s a write-freeze, not data loss.
How do I export my collections from Toby? Toby’s own export supports JSON, HTML, or TXT. JSON is the format Second Bookmark Bar’s importer reads directly, including older console-backup shapes.
Can I import Toby collections into Chrome bookmarks? Yes. Second Bookmark Bar’s Toby-JSON importer (shipped August 4, 2026) turns each Toby list into one Chrome bookmark folder, with a preview before you confirm and one-tap undo after.
Is Second Bookmark Bar a full replacement for Toby? Honestly, no — not for everything. It replaces the retrieval job (getting back to the same links fast) but not Toby’s team workspaces or dashboard-based session browsing.
What’s the best free Toby alternative? Depends on the job. For pure session parking, OneTab or Session Buddy. For the same collection-board pattern as Toby, Tabme. For always-visible retrieval of links you reach constantly, Second Bookmark Bar.