Omnivore vs OneTab: Which is better? (2026)
The short answer
OneTab is alive and Omnivore isn't — the read-it-later app shut down in November 2024. But OneTab parks tab URLs rather than saving readable articles, so most former Omnivore users actually need a different read-it-later tool, not a tab manager.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Omnivore | OneTab | 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 | Free · $48/year (≈$4/mo) or $8/month |
- Omnivore
- Free
- OneTab
- Free
- Marqly
- Free · $48/year (≈$4/mo) or $8/month
Pricing
- Omnivore: Omnivore has shut down and no longer accepts new users. Omnivore shut down in November 2024 after its team was acqui-hired by ElevenLabs. Users had until November 30, 2024 to export their data before it was deleted. The open-source code remains on GitHub, and community forks offer self-hosted deployments.
- OneTab: OneTab has a free tier. Entirely free: no paid tier, no limits, no account required. The announced end-to-end-encrypted cross-device sync is 'coming soon' with no pricing stated, so whether sync stays free is unknown.
- 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 Omnivore
Omnivore was an open-source read-it-later app that launched in 2022 and quickly became a favorite alternative to Pocket and Instapaper. It was completely free: saved articles, newsletters, PDFs, and RSS feeds landed in a clean library with labels, filters, and a notably powerful search syntax, backed by native iOS and Android apps, browser extensions for all major browsers, text-to-speech, and plugins that synced highlights to Obsidian and Logseq. In late October 2024, the team announced they had joined ElevenLabs to work on its Reader app, and the hosted service shut down the following month — users had until November 30, 2024 to export their data before it was permanently deleted. Because Omnivore was AGPL-licensed, the code remains on GitHub with well over a thousand forks, and community projects offer self-hosted deployments, though the stack (PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, multiple microservices) is demanding to run. No official successor exists.
About OneTab
OneTab is a free browser extension from UK-based OneTab Ltd that collapses every open tab into a single list with one click, cutting browser memory use by up to 95% by the developer's estimate. Tabs restore individually or all at once, and any list can be shared as a hosted web page. First released in 2013, it spent years nearly unchanged before a full v2 rewrite in 2026 added folders, in-list search, stars and tasks, and dark mode, with end-to-end-encrypted sync announced as coming soon. It stores only URLs and titles, locally in the browser profile — nothing is transmitted to the developers — and there is no account to create. Extensions exist for Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, plus a Mac-only Safari app that lags well behind. Export is a plain-text URL list. The whole product is free, with more than two million Chrome users, no limits, and no paid tier.
Which should you choose?
First, the fact that ends the contest: Omnivore closed in November 2024 after an ElevenLabs acqui-hire, deleting all hosted data that wasn’t exported in time. OneTab has been quietly alive since 2013 and even shipped a full v2 rewrite in 2026. Yet these tools never competed for the same job. Omnivore captured article content — parsed text you could read offline, highlight, and search. OneTab captures a moment: every open tab collapses into a list of URLs and titles, stored locally in your browser, and nothing more.
Choose an Omnivore fork if:
- Reading is the point — you want a clean article view, labels, highlights, and full-text search, and you’re prepared to self-host a demanding volunteer-maintained stack.
- You need your saves on a phone; forks focus on the web, but OneTab has no mobile story at all.
Choose OneTab if:
- Your real problem is 60 open tabs eating memory right now — one click parks them all, with claimed memory savings of up to 95%.
- You want zero commitment: free, no account, no limits, and tab URLs never leave your machine unless you share a list.
- You’d rather trust a tool with a 13-year track record and two million Chrome users than a community fork.
There’s an irony worth naming: both products charged nothing, but only one survived it. Omnivore’s free-with-no-revenue model ended the moment its founders moved on; OneTab’s tiny scope has kept it running since 2013. Still, don’t confuse survival with equivalence. OneTab stores no page content, offers no search of what’s inside pages, and a dead link means the content is simply gone. If Omnivore was your reading queue, OneTab is not its heir — pick an actively maintained read-it-later app and let OneTab handle the tab avalanche.
The option both sides overlook
If the real problem is finding things again, neither Omnivore nor OneTab 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.
Omnivore vs OneTab FAQ
Is OneTab a good replacement for Omnivore?
Not really. OneTab saves URLs and page titles only — no article text, no highlights, no offline reading, no full-text search — while Omnivore was a full reading app. OneTab is superb at parking an overloaded browser, but former Omnivore users who read their saves need a proper read-it-later replacement instead.
What happened to Omnivore's data?
Users had until November 30, 2024 to export their libraries; after that, all remaining hosted data was permanently deleted with no archive or read-only mode. If you exported in time, you hold a ZIP of saves and highlights. OneTab, by contrast, keeps everything locally in your browser profile — though uninstalling the extension deletes it.
Does OneTab work on mobile like Omnivore did?
No. Omnivore had well-regarded native iOS and Android apps with offline reading. OneTab has neither — no iOS app, no Android app, and no web login, since there are no accounts. The only way to view a OneTab list on a phone is to share it as a hosted web page and open that URL.