What Toby is for
Toby is for the person with forty tabs open who cannot close any of them. Its listing says exactly that: "Close your tabs without fear. Toby has them. If you have 40+ browser tabs open right now and you're afraid to close any of them, Toby was built for you."
So you save tabs into collections, gather collections into Spaces, and the whole library follows you between machines. Then Toby puts that library on your new tab, so what you see when you press Ctrl+T is your own filing cabinet instead of a search box.
It has earned its place. More than 300,000 people run it on Chrome, where it holds 4.2 stars from 3.3K ratings and a Featured badge, and the listing names teams at Google, Netflix, Amazon, HubSpot and IBM.
That is a category difference, not a feature gap. Toby is a place to put things. Dashy is a place to land. Most of what follows comes out of that one sentence.
Where Toby wins
Sessions, first. Dashy has nothing like this and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Toby saves a window full of tabs, lets you close it, and brings the whole thing back with one click. If your work is research, twelve tabs that belong together and will be needed again on Thursday, that is the job, and Toby does it well.
Sharing, second. Collections can be private or public, Spaces belong to an organization, and the Team plan adds SSO, priority support and centralized billing. Dashy is a personal page. Nobody else is looking at it.
Then the small thing power users love. Toby Links let you type to/docs or to/standup in your browser and land on the page. Dashy gives you quick links you click. If you live in the keyboard, Toby's version is faster.
And reach. Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and a web version at web.gettoby.com you can sign into from any device, which is how Toby answers the question of mobile. Dashy runs on Chrome, Edge, Brave and other Chromium browsers, and that is the whole list today.
Where Dashy is different
The difference shows up before you do anything. Dashy opens on a photograph and a clock. The wallpaper collections shift with the time of day, you can upload your own, and none of it asks you to sign in. Sound sits on the same page: rain, ocean, forest, fireplace, cafe. Toby offers themes and dark mode, which is a different kind of pleasant.
Then the tab carries your day rather than your archive. Weather finds you and appears before you configure anything. Calendar, notes and tasks are widgets you place, and they can connect to Google Calendar, Todoist and Google Tasks. Toby's answer to tasks is Toby Next, which turns saved tabs into a prioritized list. That is genuinely useful, and it is still a list of tabs.
Then the account. Toby's help centre is blunt about it: "To ensure data security and compliance with MV3 standards, all users must create an account," written when guest mode was withdrawn. Dashy's local experience needs no account at all. Nothing leaves the device until you connect something, and every integration tells you what it uses before you switch it on. If the category itself is new to you, what a new tab dashboard is sets out where that line falls.
Then the newest part. Dashy runs an MCP server, so an assistant of your own can add a widget, change the wallpaper or lay out a week for you. Nothing gets in unnamed, nothing it changes goes unrecorded, and nothing it writes runs on its own. Early access now, everyone in October 2026; the AI page walks through it. Toby AI aims narrower and hits: it names, groups and sorts your open tabs, and its help centre says the tools are optional and that "Toby is here to assist, not decide for you."
The honest trade-offs
Toby's free plan stops at 60 saved tabs, and that number argues for both sides. One reviewer in June 2026 wrote that you "can only save 60 tabs, which is barely nothing." For a heavy saver it is a wall you hit inside a week. For someone who files a project's worth of links a month, it lasts a year.
The new tab takeover cuts both ways too. Toby's help centre asks "Want to use Toby but don't want it on your new tab?" and answers by pointing you at Toby Mini, which has "all the same features but it doesn't open in every new tab." That is a fair escape hatch for people who want the tool without the page. Dashy has no equivalent, because for Dashy the page is the product.
Data is the third trade. Toby's store disclosure lists personally identifiable information, location, web history, user activity and website content. That is proportionate for something that indexes everything you save, and it is more than a wallpaper and a clock ask for.
And Dashy's record is the smaller one. The original Dashy has 10,000+ users and 4.7 stars from 273 reviews, with a Featured badge. Toby has thirty times the users. The new Dashy arrives in October 2026, and until it does, that listing is the evidence.
How to decide
Ask what you want to see when you press Ctrl+T.
If the answer is everything you saved, take Toby. Nothing else in this comparison does that job better, and the free plan is enough to find out whether 60 is a limit you notice.
If the answer is somewhere calm to start, that is what Dashy is for. A picture, a clock, sound if you want it, then the weather, the day's meetings and the two things you promised to do, without an account and without a plan to choose.
You can also have both. Install Toby Mini so the collections stay a click away rather than a page you land on, and let Dashy hold the tab. If you are weighing other options, the rest of the comparisons are written the same way, with the concession first.