The Session Buddy alternative that restores your tab groups

Why Session Buddy users start looking for an alternative

Session Buddy stores a saved session as a flat list of windows and tabs. That is enough to reopen a window, but a Chrome tab group is structural — it has a title, one of nine colors, and a collapsed or expanded state. Session Buddy records none of it, so a restore hands you back a wall of tabs you must re-group by hand. Two more issues push people to switch: Session Buddy phones home every 24h, and its review threads carry long-running reports of losing whole years of saved sessions.

What the best Session Buddy replacement needs to do

If you are replacing Session Buddy rather than tolerating it, the replacement has to close the gaps that sent you looking. The short list:

• Rebuild Chrome tab groups with their title, color, and collapsed state — not hand back a flat list.
• Keep every snapshot local so tab URLs and titles never leave the device and nothing phones home.
• Protect against the data loss Session Buddy reviewers report — auto-snapshot on exit, plus JSON export for backup.
• Import an existing Session Buddy session in two clicks rather than a manual rebuild — Tabwell Pro ships a built-in importer, included in the 14-day trial every install starts with.

How Tabwell closes the gap

Tabwell snapshots the group structure alongside the tabs and rebuilds each one through chrome.tabGroups, so three collapsed colored groups come back as three collapsed colored groups. Every snapshot is written to IndexedDB on the device via dexie — there is no account and no cloud by default, and the only network request is a license check to Polar that carries no tab data. Tabwell also takes an auto-snapshot when the browser exits and offers to restore it on the next launch, keeps a history you can export to JSON for backup, and on Pro indexes the title and URL of every saved tab for full-text search.

Migrating from Session Buddy in two clicks

1. In Session Buddy, export your saved sessions to a file.
2. Open Tabwell and choose the built-in Session Buddy importer — a Tabwell Pro feature, available during the 14-day Pro trial every install starts with.
3. Load the export — your tabs come across in two clicks, no manual re-entry.

When to choose Session Buddy instead

Session Buddy is still a reasonable pick for one job: reopening windows of loose tabs when you never use Chrome tab groups. With 1M users and a 4.66-star rating it is mature and familiar, and if group titles, colors, and collapsed state are not part of how you work — and the 24h telemetry does not bother you — the round-trip gap Tabwell closes will not matter, and there is no reason to switch.