Karakeep vs Toby: Which is better? (2026)
The short answer
Toby manages the tabs you are working in today; Karakeep archives what you want to keep forever. Teams juggling shared tab sessions should take Toby; anyone building a private, searchable library of web content should take Karakeep.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Karakeep | Toby | Marqly |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI auto-tagging | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Semantic search (find by meaning) | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| AI summaries | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| YouTube AI (summary, chat, transcript) | — | — | ✓ |
| Chat with your saves | — | — | ✓ |
| Web highlighter | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| Notes on highlights | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Save page as PDF | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| Full-text search | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| Save all open tabs | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Public sharing (boards/collections) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Pocket import | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| Browser bookmarks import | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Offline reading | ✓ | — | — |
| iOS app | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Android app | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Browser extension | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free tier | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Public API | ✓ | — | — |
| Self-hostable | ✓ | — | — |
| Price | Free · Self-hosted: free. Karakeep Cloud Pro: $4/month | Free · Productivity $4.50/member/month billed yearly ($54/yr) or $6/month; Team $8/member/month billed yearly ($96/yr) or $10/month | Free · $48/year (≈$4/mo) or $8/month |
- Karakeep
- Free · Self-hosted: free. Karakeep Cloud Pro: $4/month
- Toby
- Free · Productivity $4.50/member/month billed yearly ($54/yr) or $6/month; Team $8/member/month billed yearly ($96/yr) or $10/month
- Marqly
- Free · $48/year (≈$4/mo) or $8/month
Pricing
- Karakeep: Karakeep has a free tier; paid plans are Self-hosted: free. Karakeep Cloud Pro: $4/month. The self-hosted app is fully free and open source; AI features need your own OpenAI-compatible API key or a local Ollama model. Karakeep Cloud (public beta) has a $0 tier capped at 10 bookmarks and a Pro tier at $4/month — the exact annual price is not published.
- Toby: Toby has a free tier; paid plans are Productivity $4.50/member/month billed yearly ($54/yr) or $6/month; Team $8/member/month billed yearly ($96/yr) or $10/month. Free Starter plan caps at 60 saved tabs total — over the limit you keep read access but can't add more. No published trial length. Legacy free accounts were force-migrated to Starter in November 2024.
- Marqly: Marqly has a free tier; paid plans are $48/year (≈$4/mo) or $8/month. 7-day free trial of Pro. Free tier needs no card; Pro unlocks chat with saves and video chat.
About Karakeep
Karakeep is an open-source "bookmark everything" app, launched as Hoarder and renamed in early 2025. It is built for self-hosting: a Docker install stores links, notes, images, videos, and PDFs on your own server, with full-page archiving to guard against link rot. AI does the filing — automatic tagging and summaries run through any OpenAI-compatible API or a local Ollama model, so nothing has to leave your machine. Search is Meilisearch-backed full text, with semantic and hybrid modes added in 2026. Around the core are browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, iOS and Android apps with offline reading, highlights, shareable public lists with RSS feeds, a REST API, and an MCP server for AI agents. Imports cover Pocket, browser bookmark HTML, Omnivore, Instapaper, Linkwarden, and mymind exports. A hosted Karakeep Cloud is in public beta, with a Pro tier at $4 per month.
About Toby
Toby is a visual tab manager built around the browser's new-tab page. Open tabs save into drag-and-drop collections, whole sessions can be stashed and restored in one click, and collections group into spaces that can be shared with teammates or published as public links that require no Toby account. It began inside Vancouver venture studio Axiom Zen in 2016, was once named a top Chrome extension of the year by Google and Product Hunt, and now claims more than 500,000 users under operator Launch Labs. Extensions cover Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, a web app works anywhere, and companion apps bring collections to iOS and Android. Toby AI can name, sort, and group open tabs automatically. Toby stores links rather than page content, so there is no archiving, highlighting, or full-text search. The free Starter plan caps at 60 saved tabs; Productivity costs $4.50 per member per month billed yearly, and Team runs $8 with SSO and centralized billing.
Which should you choose?
Karakeep and Toby occupy different layers of your browser life. Toby lives at the surface: your new-tab page becomes a visual board of drag-and-drop collections, whole sessions stash and restore in one click, and spaces are shared with teammates or published as public links. Karakeep lives underneath, as long-term storage: everything you save is archived in full on your own server, auto-tagged by AI, and indexed for full-text and semantic search. One is a workbench; the other is a vault.
Choose Toby if:
- Your work happens in recurring tab sets — client projects, research sprints, standing dashboards — that you save, restore, and hand to colleagues.
- Collaboration is the point: shared spaces, invites, and no-account public links have no counterpart in Karakeep.
- You want convenience AI, not infrastructure AI — Toby AI names, sorts, and groups your open tabs automatically without any API key.
Choose Karakeep if:
- You are keeping things, not just arranging them: full-page archiving means your saves outlive the sites they came from.
- Findability at scale matters — AI tagging, summaries, and Meilisearch-backed semantic search versus Toby’s link-only collections with no full-text search.
- You want ownership and extensibility: open source, self-hosted, with a REST API, webhooks, and an MCP server, where Toby offers no public API.
Call it what it is: an odd pairing. Toby is the strongest team-oriented tab manager in its class, and its 60-tab free cap plus per-member pricing are the tax on that polish. Karakeep is free, private, and permanent, and Docker setup is the tax on that freedom. If a page matters next quarter, it belongs in Karakeep; if it matters this afternoon, keep it in Toby.
The option both sides overlook
If the real problem is finding things again, neither Karakeep nor Toby fully solves it. Marqly auto-tags and summarizes every save with AI and lets you retrieve any of them by describing what you remember — plus a highlighter, YouTube summaries with transcripts, and save-as-PDF. There's a free tier with no card required.
Karakeep vs Toby FAQ
Does Toby save page content the way Karakeep does?
No. Toby stores links only — no page archiving, no highlights, no full-text search — so if a linked page disappears, so does its content. Karakeep saves a full page copy, screenshot, and PDF (even yt-dlp video downloads) to your own server, which is exactly the difference between a session manager and an archive.
Which is better for teams, Karakeep or Toby?
Toby, clearly. It offers shared spaces, member invites, org-wide collections, and SSO on the $8/member/month Team plan, and anyone can view a shared collection link without a Toby account. Karakeep is a single-user tool at heart — it can publish public lists with RSS feeds, but it has no team workspaces, invites, or collaboration features.
How do Karakeep and Toby compare on price?
Karakeep is free if you self-host (bring a Docker server and your own AI key or Ollama model), with a hosted Cloud Pro tier at $4/month. Toby's free Starter plan caps at 60 saved tabs total; beyond that it is $4.50/member/month billed yearly for Productivity or $8/member/month for Team. Solo users feel Toby's per-member pricing more.