Cluster Tab Manager Alternative: What to Use Now That It's Stalled

If you searched for a Cluster alternative, there's a good chance you already know why: the extension hasn't shipped a real update since 2019, and it was built on Chrome's older Manifest V2 platform. When Chrome phased out MV2 extensions, Cluster never shipped the Manifest V3 update needed to stay eligible — and independent reports (including competing tab-manager vendors tracking the same MV3 cutoff) say it was disabled/removed from the Chrome Web Store as a result. Its own former homepage, clusterwm.com, no longer resolves either.

We couldn't get a clean, unauthenticated look at today's live Chrome Web Store listing to confirm the exact current state page-by-page — if you can still see it in your own account, your mileage may vary. What's clear from multiple outside sources is the trend: no updates since 2019, no MV3 migration, and a maintainer who's gone quiet. That combination is exactly what Chrome's MV2 cutoff was built to catch.

This isn't a "maybe switch someday" post. If Cluster still runs for you today, treat that as borrowed time, not stability — get your saved projects out before you're forced to do it without warning. Here's an honest look at what to move to.

What Cluster actually did well

Worth naming, because a good replacement should cover the same ground:

• Window and tab overview. A popup showing every open window and its tabs, so you could jump straight to one instead of alt-tabbing blind.
• Sort and declutter. Reorder or group tabs for a cleaner overview without leaving the popup.
• Suspend to save memory. Put windows/tabs to sleep so idle ones stopped eating RAM.
• Session save/restore ("projects"). Save a window's tabs as a named project, close it, and restore the whole thing later.
• Undo. Recover a tab or window you closed by accident.
• Search and filter. Find a tab by title or URL across open windows.

That's a genuinely useful feature set — which is exactly why it's worth a real replacement, not just abandoning the habit.

1. Amazing Tabs — active development, same core jobs

Disclosure: we built Amazing Tabs. We didn't build it as a direct Cluster clone, but the core jobs overlap closely, and ours ships regular updates instead of a 2019 timestamp.

Mapped to what Cluster did:

• Window/tab overview + search: Press ⌘K / Ctrl+K anywhere to instantly search every saved tab, group, or session by title — faster than Cluster's popup-and-scroll.
• Session save/restore: Save a window or a set of tabs as a session, close it, restore it later — same idea as Cluster's "projects," with cross-device sync on top.
• Suspend/memory relief: Saving and closing tabs frees the memory the same way Cluster's suspend did, since the tabs actually close rather than just going dormant.
• Undo: Closed or saved items stay retrievable, so an accidental close isn't a lost tab.
• What's different: Amazing Tabs leans on explicit save-and-close rather than Cluster's live-window suspend-in-place. If you specifically liked keeping windows open but dormant (rather than closing and restoring), that's a workflow change to expect.

Pricing:

• Free: up to 100 saved links, no card required.
• Premium: $2.90/mo billed annually ($34.80/yr), or $4.90/mo monthly. Cancel any time, 30-day refund.
• Lifetime: $99 one-time, capped at 200 founder spots.

Cluster's core features were free, with cross-device sync gated behind a one-time license fee (reported around $10) rather than a subscription — so it's not a purely free-to-paid jump if syncing across machines is what you need. What you get with Amazing Tabs for the subscription is a tool someone is still actively shipping fixes and features for, on a platform that won't get disabled out from under you.

2. OneTab — the free, no-frills swap

If the Cluster feature you actually used was "collapse this mess of tabs into a list," OneTab is the closest free match, and asks nothing in return.

• One click collapses all open tabs (or the current window) into a saved list.
• Fully local, no account, no signup, no paid tier at all.
• Lists can be renamed, reordered, and shared as a public URL.

Where it doesn't match Cluster:

• No window-level suspend — it's collapse-to-list, not sleep-in-place.
• No cross-device sync yet (listed as "coming soon"; export/import only for now).
• The new search bar (added March 2026) only works on OneTab's own list page; its older address-bar keyword (11 + query) works from any tab but isn't mentioned on the list page itself.

Pick OneTab if: you mostly used Cluster's suspend/declutter feature and don't care about multi-device access. It's free and does that one job well.

3. Toby — visual boards instead of a popup list

Toby swaps Cluster's popup-list style for a new-tab-page board of tile collections.

• New tab becomes a grid of named collections you build by dragging tabs in.
• Cloud sync tied to an account, so collections follow you across devices.
• Free tier caps at 60 saved tabs; Pro ($4.50/mo billed yearly, $6/mo monthly) removes the cap.

Where it doesn't match Cluster:

• No suspend-in-place — it's a save-and-organize tool, not a live memory-management one.
• Toby does have its own popup search (press / to jump to it), but day-to-day organizing is still drag-and-drop into collections, not the quick keyboard-first popup search Cluster users are used to.

Pick Toby if: you want the "projects" side of Cluster with a nicer visual layout, and you're fine losing the live-window memory suspend feature.

4. Native Chrome tab groups + Memory Saver — the zero-extension answer

Chrome itself now covers a chunk of what Cluster did, without installing anything:

• Tab groups — name and colour-code tabs into groups, collapse them to declutter the bar.
• Memory Saver (Chrome's built-in setting) — automatically frees memory from inactive tabs, similar in spirit to Cluster's manual suspend.
• Tab search (the small dropdown arrow, top-right of the tab strip) — search open tabs by title.

Where this stops:

• No real cross-session "project" save/restore — closing a group loses it unless you'd bookmarked it first.
• No cross-device continuity beyond basic Chrome Sync of open tabs.

Pick this if: you were a light Cluster user and mostly wanted decluttering and memory relief, not saved sessions you return to weeks later.

Side-by-side: pick by what you used Cluster for

What you used in Cluster	Best replacement
Suspend tabs to save memory	OneTab, or Chrome's built-in Memory Saver
Saved "projects" you reopen later	Amazing Tabs, Toby
Popup search across open tabs	Amazing Tabs (⌘K / Ctrl+K search)
Visual collections you browse	Toby
Wanted it free, no account	OneTab, Chrome built-ins
Wanted it actively maintained, with sync	Amazing Tabs

The migration: what it actually takes

Cluster doesn't offer a bulk export, so this is manual, but usually quick:

1. Open Cluster's popup and list your saved projects. Most users have a handful, not dozens — Cluster projects tend to accumulate slower than open tabs do.
2. Restore each project once, so its tabs are open in a window.
3. Re-save it in your new tool — a session in Amazing Tabs, a collapsed list in OneTab, or a collection in Toby.
4. Skip anything stale. If you haven't opened a saved project in months, that's a sign to let it go rather than migrate it.

Realistic time: under an hour for most people, since Cluster's saved-project lists tend to be short.

When staying on Cluster might still make sense

We'd rather be straight about this than oversell switching:

• It's still installed and technically running in your browser right now, and you haven't hit a problem yet.
• You've got no cross-device needs and don't mind that it may stop working without warning.
• You're not ready to pick a replacement yet and just wanted to know your options first.

None of that makes it a safe long-term bet — an MV2 extension that never migrated to MV3 is a "when it stops working," not "if," situation, and by most reports that "when" has already happened for a lot of installs. Don't wait for it to break to move your saved projects out.

Try the actively-maintained option. Add Amazing Tabs to Chrome — free up to 100 saved links, no card required. Press ⌘K / Ctrl+K after install to search saved tabs instantly.

The honest pick

• Wanted memory relief, nothing fancy, free: OneTab or Chrome's built-in Memory Saver.
• Wanted saved "projects" with search and sync, actively maintained: Amazing Tabs.
• Wanted a visual board of collections: Toby.
• Barely used Cluster, don't want another extension at all: Chrome tab groups.

If Cluster's popup search-and-restore was the actual habit you built, Amazing Tabs is the closest match with an active roadmap behind it instead of a seven-year-old commit history.

Further reading: OneTab vs Toby vs Workona vs Amazing Tabs for the full four-way comparison.

Add Amazing Tabs to Chrome — free → Install from the Chrome Web Store. 100 saved links free, then $2.90/mo billed annually (or $4.90/mo) for unlimited and cross-device sync, $99 lifetime capped at 200 founder spots. See pricing for the full breakdown.