What start.me is for
start.me is a start page you keep, not a picture you look at. Its Chrome listing says it turns "your Chrome New Tab page into a beautiful personal dashboard," and the dashboard in question is mostly made of links: bookmarks inside widgets, widgets inside columns, columns on a page you can share. The listing counts more than 3,500 widgets and claims more than 850,000 people across the service.
The people who love it are the people with a lot to keep track of. Researchers. Teachers. Analysts who read forty feeds. start.me publishes solution pages for education and for OSINT and cybersecurity work, which tells you who showed up. It is a Dutch company, start.me BV in Den Haag, and the product feels built for someone with a job to do rather than a mood to set.
That is the honest split. One page wants to be the index of your working life. The other wants the moment you open a tab to feel good. If you want the category explained before the comparison, what a new tab dashboard is covers the shape of it.
Where start.me wins
Bookmarks, first and by a distance. You import from any browser, and on PRO you sort links into groups, run a cleanup that finds broken and duplicate links, upload documents next to them, and read analytics on which links actually get clicked. Dashy has nothing approaching that depth and is not trying to build it.
RSS, second. It is the feature reviewers keep coming back for. One in June 2026 wrote that the news feeds supersede what is available from Feedly or even Inoreader. Charts, embeds, financial widgets and integrations with AdSense, Google Calendar and Trello sit alongside it, so a page can watch things as well as store them.
Reach, third. Because the page is hosted rather than local, the same one opens in Safari, in Firefox and in Opera, and its phone and tablet apps carry your bookmarks with you. That is not a feature start.me bolted on; it is a consequence of how it was built, and it is the single hardest thing on this page for Dashy to answer.
Teams, fourth. A shared workspace, a custom subdomain, your own branding, SAML single sign-on, admin controls, page analytics. Dashy has no team story at all.
And support, which is easy to overlook when you are counting features. Scroll the store reviews and the developer has answered nearly every one, usually within days, including the unhappy ones, with specific instructions rather than an apology template. The most recent blog entry is a July 2026 update. The extension listing looks abandoned. The service plainly is not.
Where Dashy is different
Dashy opens with a photograph, not a directory. Wallpapers arrive as curated collections that change with the time of day, you can upload your own, and none of it asks you to sign in. Under the picture: the clock, the greeting, the date, and weather that has already found you before you configure anything.
Then sound, which is the difference you hear before you read anything. Rain, ocean, forest, fireplace, cafe and more are included, playing on the tab, with nothing else to install. Ambient audio appears nowhere in start.me's feature list, and it would sit oddly in a product organized around columns of links.
Then the layout. start.me lets you drag bookmarks, widgets and columns, adjust column widths and resize widgets inside them. Dashy lets you put a widget anywhere on a grid, resize it, restyle it, and start from one of four templates: Focus, Productive, Curious, Aesthetic. That freedom costs nothing.
Then the part that works from outside the product. Dashy runs an MCP server, so an assistant of your own builds the tab from a sentence. It has to be approved by name first, its edits are recorded, and whatever it invents sits switched off until you have read it. Early access now, everyone in October 2026; the AI page sets out what an assistant can and cannot touch.
start.me has AI of its own, and it deserves naming precisely rather than waving away. PRO includes Smart AI Features that tidy bookmark titles, sort links into place and suggest sites worth adding. That is intelligence working inside the product. Dashy's is an assistant you already use, working on the page from outside it. Different ideas, both legitimate.
The honest trade-offs
Everything hosted has a price, and start.me pays it in the right place for what it is. Your page lives on its servers, which is exactly why it turns up on your phone. The flip side shows up in the developer's own reply to a March 2026 review about lost settings: the data still exists in the cloud, but reconnecting to it requires an account, and clearing browser data without one breaks the link. The Chrome listing discloses that the extension handles personally identifiable information and location.
Dashy pays the opposite price. The local tab needs no account and nothing leaves the device until you connect something, but that also means no Safari, no phone app, no shared team page, and sync across devices sitting on a paid plan.
The free tiers differ in kind, not just in size. start.me's caps you at three start pages, limits you to basic widgets, and in its own words includes advertising, which PRO removes. Dashy's customization is free, and the tab you build works without an account.
Scale, finally. The original Dashy has 10,000+ users and 4.7 stars from 273 reviews with a Featured badge. start.me's listing shows 100,000 users at 4.3 from 1.4K ratings, and its own site claims a far bigger base across the web app. On numbers alone, start.me is the more established product.
How to decide
Ask what the tab is holding.
If it is holding your links, take start.me. Nothing here beats it at bookmarks, feeds and shared pages, and it will follow you onto a phone and into Safari, which Dashy will not.
If it is holding your attention, take Dashy. A picture that changes through the day, rain or a fireplace while you work, your calendar and tasks where you can see them without opening anything, and an assistant that can arrange the lot for you. No account required for any of that.
These two are not really rivals. One is a filing system that happens to open on a new tab. The other is a new tab that happens to keep your day. If you are weighing a third option, the other comparisons here are written the same way: the concession first.