How to import Session Buddy to Tabwell

What a Session Buddy export holds

Session Buddy saves a session as a set of windows, each one a list of the tabs it held — title and URL. That is more structure than a single flat dump, but it stops at the window: Session Buddy ignores Chrome tab groups, so the group a tab belonged to, the group's title, its color, and whether it was collapsed are not in the export. Its telemetry also phones home every 24 hours, which is one reason power users move off it. Before you migrate, set expectations — the export brings windows and URLs across, not a group layout, because Session Buddy never recorded one. The structure is something you rebuild once in Tabwell, after which Tabwell preserves it on every save and restore.

Migrating from Session Buddy to Tabwell in two clicks

The migration uses Tabwell's built-in Session Buddy importer — there is no manual copy-paste and no third-party converter. Work through it in order:

1. Install Tabwell from the Chrome Web Store and pin it to the toolbar. Every install starts with a 14-day Pro trial, which is what makes the importer available.
2. In Session Buddy, export your saved sessions to a JSON file using Session Buddy's own export option.
3. Open Tabwell, open the importer, and choose Session Buddy as the source.
4. Load the Session Buddy JSON export. The saved windows and their URLs come across in two clicks and land as a Tabwell snapshot you can open from the side panel.
5. Arrange the imported tabs into Chrome tab groups and save them — from here Tabwell records each group's title, color, and collapsed state through the chrome.tabGroups API, so the layout survives the next save and restore.

What carries over and what you rebuild

The windows, tab titles, and URLs carry over — that is the research worth migrating, the part you spent a year collecting. Group structure does not, because, as above, Session Buddy never stored it. That is not a Tabwell limitation; it is the gap between a windowed URL list and a full session record. Once the import lands as a snapshot, you group the tabs the way you want, and Tabwell's snapshot keeps that grouping with full fidelity going forward. For the grouping mechanics, see the guide on saving Chrome tab groups; for getting a snapshot back on screen, see the restore guide linked below.

How the importer is gated

The built-in Session Buddy importer is a Tabwell Pro feature. Every install starts with a 14-day Pro trial and no credit card, so you can run the migration on day one before you decide anything. After the trial, the Free tier keeps your latest 5 snapshots with manual save and restore and a 60-minute auto-snapshot; Pro lifts the 5-snapshot cap, indexes every saved tab for full-text search, auto-snapshots every 5 minutes, and is what keeps the importer enabled — $3.99/month, $29/year, or $19 one-time for the first 1,000 Founders buyers ($59 after).