Obsidian Web Clipper vs Toby: Which is better? (2026)
The short answer
A workflow tool versus a knowledge tool. Toby organizes browsing sessions and shares them with a team; Obsidian Web Clipper preserves page content as private, local Markdown. Pick by which problem you actually have — few people have both in one tool's shape.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Obsidian Web Clipper | 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 | 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 |
- Obsidian Web Clipper
- Free
- 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
- Obsidian Web Clipper: Obsidian Web Clipper has a free tier. The clipper and the Obsidian app are completely free, including commercial use (policy since February 2025). The only paid add-ons are optional: Obsidian Sync from $4/month billed annually ($5 monthly) for cross-device sync, and Obsidian Publish at $8/site/month for public sharing.
- 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 Obsidian Web Clipper
Obsidian Web Clipper is the official, open-source browser extension for Obsidian, the local-first Markdown note app. It runs on Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari — including Safari on iOS and iPadOS — and saves pages, selections, or highlights as clean Markdown files in your vault, where they stay on your own disk with zero lock-in. Per-site templates decide how each clip is titled, tagged, and filed, pulling metadata through selector and Schema.org variables. An optional Interpreter feature runs natural-language prompts at clip time — summarize, extract, translate — using your own API key from Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, and others, or a local Ollama model at no cost. Everything is free, including commercial use of Obsidian since early 2025. The trade-off is that cloud conveniences are add-ons: cross-device sync via Obsidian Sync starts at $4 per month, and public sharing via Obsidian Publish costs $8 per site 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?
Toby and Obsidian Web Clipper barely speak the same language. Toby’s vocabulary is sessions, spaces, and teams: open tabs saved into visual collections on the new-tab page, restored tomorrow, or handed to a colleague via a link that needs no account. Obsidian’s is vaults, files, and permanence: web pages distilled into Markdown you own outright, filed by templates, highlighted passage by passage, never touching anyone’s cloud. One coordinates attention; the other accumulates knowledge.
Choose Toby if:
- Your browser is a shared workspace — project tab sets that teammates open, extend, and restore all week.
- Friction kills your habit: one click banks a whole session, and Toby AI names and groups tabs without configuration.
- You want reach without setup — Chrome, Edge, and Firefox extensions, a web app, and iOS/Android companions, versus Obsidian’s requirement that you run its app at all.
Choose Obsidian Web Clipper if:
- What pages say matters more than where they live — full content lands in your vault as searchable, permanent plain text.
- Privacy and ownership are hard requirements: local files, open source, zero telemetry stakes, and AI (the Interpreter) runnable on a free local Ollama model.
- Cost sensitivity is real — Obsidian stays free at any scale, while Toby’s 60-tab ceiling arrives fast for a genuine tab hoarder.
Bottom line: an odd-couple matchup with a clean resolution. If your problem statement contains the words “team,” “session,” or “too many tabs,” Toby is the answer and Obsidian would frustrate you. If it contains “keep,” “search,” or “mine,” Obsidian’s clipper wins and Toby’s link-only collections would quietly lose your material to link rot. Name the problem first; the tool follows.
The option both sides overlook
If the real problem is finding things again, neither Obsidian Web Clipper 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.
Obsidian Web Clipper vs Toby FAQ
Which preserves what I save, Obsidian or Toby?
Obsidian, entirely. Its clipper converts pages, selections, or highlighted passages into Markdown files stored on your own disk — the content itself, not a pointer to it. Toby stores links only, with no page archiving, no highlights, and no full-text search, so anything behind a link that later dies or changes is unrecoverable from Toby's side.
Can I share collections from Obsidian the way Toby does?
Not without paying, and not in the same spirit. Obsidian is private by default — sharing clipped content publicly requires Obsidian Publish at $8/site/month, and there are no collaborative spaces. Toby makes sharing central: spaces for teams, member invites, org-wide collections, SSO on the Team plan, and public collection links that open without any Toby account.
What do these tools cost?
Obsidian's clipper and app are completely free, commercial use included; optional Sync costs $4/month and Publish $8/month. Toby's free Starter plan caps at 60 saved tabs total, after which Productivity runs $4.50/member/month billed yearly ($54/yr) and Team $8/member/month ($96/yr). A solo user can live free in Obsidian indefinitely; in Toby, only lightly.