CaptureTools is one Chrome extension holding nineteen tools. The obvious question is whether that is better than installing nineteen — or, more realistically, the five or six single-purpose extensions most people actually run. This is the honest version of that comparison, including the parts where the other tools win.
All competitor figures below were read from the vendors’ own Chrome Web Store listings and pricing pages on 31 August 2026. Extension listings change constantly; if you are reading this much later, check the links rather than trusting the table.
What is actually on your toolbar right now
Nobody sets out to install six extensions. It happens one problem at a time: you need a full-page screenshot, then you lose a window of tabs, then you want to highlight a spec, then you want the tab count under control. Each install is individually reasonable. The stack is what costs you.
Screenshot and capture
| Extension | Users | Price | Data posture as declared |
|---|---|---|---|
| GoFullPage | 11,000,000 | Free with a paid premium tier | Listing declares it will not collect or use your data |
| Awesome Screenshot | 4,000,000 | Freemium, paid tiers | Listing declares it handles website content |
| FireShot | 3,000,000 | Free; Pro 39.95 USD per year or 99.95 USD once | Listing declares it will not collect or use your data; vendor states captures are local |
| Scribe | 1,000,000 | Free tier; Pro Personal 25 USD per user per month billed yearly | Listing declares it handles user activity and website content |
| CaptureTools (Sealshot) | New | Free, no paid tier | Listing declares no data collection; no network requests, no account, no telemetry |
Where they win. Scribe is not really a screenshot tool and it is better than us at what it does do: it turns a click-through into a written, step-numbered procedure with images, which is a genuinely different product. FireShot’s paid tier buys OCR and PDF export that Sealshot does not have. If your job is producing documentation, buy Scribe.
Sessions and tab management
| Extension | Users | Price | Where the data lives |
|---|---|---|---|
| OneTab | 2,000,000 | Free | Vendor states tab URLs are never transmitted, except the opt-in share feature |
| Session Buddy | 900,000 | Free, no account required | Vendor states data is stored on your device, never on a server |
| Toby | 300,000 | Free up to 60 tabs; 54 USD per year | Account-based cloud sync; listing declares it handles web history and website content |
| Workona | 200,000 | Free tier plus paid plans | Spaces stored in Workona’s cloud; account required for sync |
| Tab Manager Plus | 200,000 | Free, open source | Developer states everything happens offline in your browser |
| CaptureTools (Backtrack, Tab Ledger) | New | Free | Local browser storage only, namespaced per tool |
Where they win. This is the category where the honest answer is closest. Toby and Workona are built around shared team workspaces and cross-device sync, and CaptureTools has neither — deliberately, because both require an account and a server, which is the thing the whole extension is built to avoid. If you need three colleagues looking at the same set of tabs, we are the wrong tool and it is not close.
Highlighting and annotation
| Extension | Users | Price | Account required |
|---|---|---|---|
| Glasp | 500,000 | Free; Pro 150 USD per year | Yes. Free tier highlights are public; private highlights are a Pro feature |
| Liner | 300,000 | Free; Pro 15 USD per month billed annually | Page content is sent to Liner’s servers for AI features |
| Weava | 200,000 | Free; Premium 3.99 USD per month | Yes. Highlights are stored on Weava’s servers |
| Hypothesis | 200,000 | Free | Yes. Listing declares it handles authentication information and website content |
| Diigo | 200,000 | Free tier | Yes, to store and sync |
| CaptureTools (Lantern, Scroll Marks) | New | Free | No. Highlights and anchors never leave the browser profile |
Where they win. Hypothesis is a public, standards-minded annotation layer over the open web, run by a non-profit — that is a mission CaptureTools does not have and should not pretend to. Glasp’s value is the social layer: seeing what other people highlighted. Liner will summarise a page for you. All three trade locality for something real. Lantern gives you the trade in the other direction: your highlights are only ever yours, and only ever on this machine.
Focus and time
| Extension | Users | Price | Data posture as declared |
|---|---|---|---|
| BlockSite | 1,000,000+ | Free with premium upgrade | Listing declares it collects web history |
| Forest | 800,000 | Extension free; Forest Plus subscription varies by region | Listing declares it will not collect or use your data |
| StayFocusd | 700,000 | Free | Listing declares web history, user activity and website content |
| Marinara | 90,000 | Free, open source | Listing declares it will not collect or use your data |
| RescueTime | 30,000 | Extension free; service from 84 USD per year | Requires a RescueTime account; listing carries no data disclosure |
| CaptureTools (Focus Ledger) | New | Free | Local only, no account |
Where they win. RescueTime measures everything you do, not just Chrome, and Forest works on your phone where most of the distraction actually is. Focus Ledger is a browser-scoped ledger. It cannot follow you to your phone, and it is not trying to.
What does installing six extensions actually cost?
Not memory — I want to be careful here. The most rigorous public benchmark of Chrome extension performance is DebugBear’s 2020 report across the thousand most popular extensions, and it was measured under Manifest V2, where every extension held a persistent background page. Manifest V3 replaced those with service workers that run only when needed. So the old per-extension memory figures do not transfer, and I have found no rigorous public measurement that replaces them. Anyone quoting you a megabyte number for MV3 extensions is guessing. CaptureTools does not claim a performance win, because I cannot prove one.
The cost that is real and documented is the permission surface. Chrome describes the broad host grant as access to “your data on all the websites you visit”, which means the extension can read, request or modify data on every page — your bank, your email, your employer’s admin panel. Every extension holding that grant is a separate program with that power. Six extensions is six of them, from six vendors, on six independent release schedules.
Chrome’s own developer documentation tells extension authors to avoid this. The permissions guide says to “consider implementing optional permissions or a less powerful API to avoid alarming warnings”, and the Permissions API docs are explicit that requesting at run time rather than install time means “users understand why the permissions are needed and grant only those that are necessary”. Most extensions ask for everything at install anyway, because it is easier.
The risk nobody prices in
Chrome checks for extension updates on startup and every few hours and installs them silently while the extension is idle. There is exactly one brake: if an update adds a permission that triggers a warning, the extension is disabled until you accept it. An update that stays inside permissions you already granted ships with no prompt at all.
That is not theoretical. Three documented cases, none of them extensions listed above:
- The Great Suspender was sold by its developer in June 2020. An update four months later added tracking code that executed script fetched from a remote server. Google force-uninstalled it in February 2021 and flagged it as malware. It had over two million users, all of whom had installed something perfectly good.
- Cyberhaven and roughly a dozen other extensions were compromised in December 2024 via spearphishing that tricked developers into authorising a malicious OAuth app with permission to publish on their behalf. The malicious updates harvested session cookies and access tokens.
- QuickLens changed hands in February 2026. A malicious update seventeen days later stripped security headers from every HTTP response and polled a remote server every five minutes for JavaScript to inject.
I could find no Chrome documentation describing any user notification when an extension changes ownership. That is an absence of documentation rather than a stated Google position, but the practical effect in the cases above was the same: nobody was told.
The point is not that the extensions in my tables are dangerous. It is that six vendors is six independent chances for this to happen to you, and the trust decision has to be made six times.
How is CaptureTools built differently?
Four decisions, and they are all consequences of the same idea — the bundle only makes sense if the tools cannot reach each other.
- Quiet permissions at install. The install-time set is storage, alarms, context menus, scripting, active tab, side panel, offscreen and idle. Broad host access, tabs and notifications are optional permissions, requested from the settings page at the moment you switch a tool on — which is the pattern Chrome’s own docs recommend and almost nobody follows.
- Namespaced storage. Every tool writes under a prefix keyed to its own id. Lantern cannot read Focus Ledger’s data because it has nowhere to look.
- No network, no account, no telemetry, no remote code. Nothing leaves the browser profile. That is also why there is no sync and no team feature — it is the same decision seen from the other side.
- One plugin socket. Menus, commands, permission lifecycle, settings tabs and content-script registration are all generated from a single registry, so a nineteenth tool is a registry entry rather than nineteen edits. That is what makes bundling nineteen tools maintainable by one person instead of a stunt.
When should you not use CaptureTools?
If you need cross-device sync, use Toby, Workona or Session Buddy’s future cloud tier. If you need a team workspace, use Workona. If you need documentation generated from a click-through, use Scribe. If you want AI summaries of pages, use Liner. If your distraction problem is your phone, use Forest. If you want a public annotation layer over the open web, use Hypothesis. Every one of those is a real capability CaptureTools does not have, and buying a worse version of it bundled with eighteen other things would be a bad trade.
CaptureTools is for the case where you have accumulated a shelf of small utilities, you use each one occasionally, and you would rather have one thing you can audit than six things you have stopped thinking about.
What are the nineteen tools?
Apps: Sealshot, Backtrack, Lantern, Tab Ledger, Focus Ledger. Tools: Scroll Marks, Print Composer, Reader Ledger, Selector Sketch, Form Guard. Utilities: Paste Sanitizer, Case Convert, Unit Overlay, Anchor Copy, Zoom Memory, Media Speed, Image Alt Peek, Table Copy, Focus Ring. Each one is switchable independently, and a tool you have not enabled registers nothing.
CaptureTools 0.6.0 is on the Chrome Web Store. The project page is at CaptureTools, alongside the rest of the DHSeaDev projects.