Wallabag vs Toby: Which is better? (2026)
The short answer
Toby organizes what you're working on; Wallabag preserves what you want to read. Take Toby for live sessions and team tab-sharing, Wallabag for a permanent, self-hosted reading library.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Wallabag | 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 · €11/year on wallabag.it (official hosting; also €4 for 3 months, or a €30/year supporter plan) | 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 |
- Wallabag
- Free · €11/year on wallabag.it (official hosting; also €4 for 3 months, or a €30/year supporter plan)
- 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
- Wallabag: Wallabag has a free tier; paid plans are €11/year on wallabag.it (official hosting; also €4 for 3 months, or a €30/year supporter plan). 14-day free trial on wallabag.it, no card required. Self-hosting is completely free — Wallabag is open-source (MIT). The wallabag.it hosted service funds development and includes all features on every plan.
- 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 Wallabag
Wallabag is an open-source read-it-later application, started in 2013 in France and maintained continuously since. You can run it on your own server for free or use the official hosted service at wallabag.it, which costs €11 a year (with a 14-day free trial) and funds development of the open-source project. Saved articles are stripped to a clean reading view, can be tagged manually or through rule-based automatic tagging, annotated with notes on selected text, and exported to PDF, ePub, and other formats — a favorite feature for e-reader owners. Wallabag offers browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox, native iOS and Android apps with offline reading, RSS feeds of your saves, public share links for individual articles, and a full REST API. Importers cover Pocket, Instapaper, Readability, and browser bookmark files. The trade-off is polish: the interface is functional rather than beautiful, and there are no AI features.
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 Wallabag both answer “where do these browser pages go?” — but for different tenses. Toby handles the present: open tabs drag into visual collections on your new-tab page, whole sessions save and restore in one click, and spaces are shared with teammates or published as no-login public links. Wallabag handles the future: each saved page is parsed into clean article text and stored — on your server if you wish — to be read offline, annotated, and exported to an e-reader long after the tab closed.
Choose Toby if:
- Your work lives in tab sessions you need back tomorrow, per project, per client.
- Sharing is the point — team spaces, member invites, org-wide collections, and SSO on the Team plan.
- You’d enjoy Toby AI naming, sorting, and grouping your open tabs automatically.
Choose Wallabag if:
- Content outlasting the link matters: Toby stores bare links, so a dead URL means the page is gone, while Wallabag keeps the text.
- You want full-text search across everything you’ve saved — Toby has none.
- Open source and cost control appeal: free self-hosted, or €11/year, versus Toby’s per-member subscriptions.
Pricing shapes the verdict more than usual here. Toby’s free Starter plan caps at 60 saved tabs total — hit it and you can look but not add — and paid plans run $4.50 to $8 per member per month billed yearly, which is designed for teams and stings for individuals. Wallabag has no caps anywhere and one of the cheapest hosted plans in existence. A team that works out of shared tab sessions gets real value from Toby that Wallabag can’t offer. A solo reader building a library gets almost nothing from Toby that a bookmark bar doesn’t already do — and everything from Wallabag.
The option both sides overlook
If the real problem is finding things again, neither Wallabag 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.
Wallabag vs Toby FAQ
Does Toby keep a copy of saved pages?
No. Toby stores links plus your notes and tags — there's no page archiving, no highlights, and no full-text search, so content behind a dead link is lost. Wallabag downloads and stores the parsed article text itself, keeping it readable, searchable, and exportable even if the original page disappears or changes.
How do the free plans compare?
Wallabag is free without limits if you self-host, and its €11/year hosted plan includes every feature. Toby's free Starter tier caps at 60 saved tabs total; beyond that you keep read access but can't add more. Toby's paid plans are per member — $4.50/month (Productivity) or $8/month (Team) billed yearly.
Is Wallabag any good for teams?
Not really — it's single-player by design. You can share individual articles via public links and expose RSS feeds of your saves, but there are no shared collections, member roles, or collaborative spaces. Toby is the team tool here, with shared spaces, org-wide collections, and SSO on its Team plan.