Workona vs Shift Browser

Workona is somewhere between a browser, tab manager, and team workspace, tying in all of your cloud apps together. It tries to solve the open tabs problem by essentially leveraging the existing tab management functionality of your browser (along with tab groups), but upgrading the functionality massively.

What if you were to click on a workspace, and magically all of your open tabs archived themselves, and only the relevant tabs of the workspace opened themselves up. That's Workona in a nutshell.

With that, you've probably seen (especially within the past couple years), a myriad of "productivity browsers" popping up (here you can see a list of the best web browsers that I'm referencing). Well Workona tried solving this space not with a new browser, but a browser extension instead, super creative.

If you're someone that is wearing multiple hats at a company and jumping in and out of many open tabs, Workona is aiming to solve that exact pain-point.

If you're like most people who are using Chrome or Safari and have no interest whatsoever to change browsers, then Workona is for you as all that's involved is installing a Chromium extension.

Now while Workona is great for those who are set in their browser ways, we do feel like some other tools do handle actual tab management better (e.g. Dia and Arc Browser), that said, you'd need to be open to installing an entirely new browser.

If that sounds like you (oh, and alternative browsers like Arc do still allow for extensions), then we might recommend giving one of our best browser software recommendations a shot first.

Oddly enough, you could in theory install Workona on Arc (because Arc is Chromium-based), just not sure exactly what would happen, might be a bit odd is all 😅

Here's an excerpt from a larger write-up here that goes more into the over-encompassing browser & tab management evolution, posting a snippet as it gets some of this across:

In my never-ending search to find my “portal to the internet Chrome experience”, I stumbled upon a totally re-imagined Chrome extension and tab management experience called Workona.

It was ChromeOS + Workona that enabled me to finally experience a glimpse into what I had always hoped for the “portal” vision to be, it mostly checked the boxes:

1. A better way to build out workspaces and processes for personal and business usage
2. Deeper integration with the existing web apps we love and use today
3. Sharable workspaces, build out your sales process and share the created workspace with your sales team
4. Accessible from any system (if you logged into a Chromebook, it would auto-install the extension and just like that, you’re where you left off)

Read the rest of the article to see how this early obsession in Workona turned into a job offer to move to Silicon Valley and help them build out the over-encompassing vision.

Workona does a lot, though their main bread and butter is tab management and shared team workspaces to share important links. The beautiful thing about links are that most things are links now-a-days, from assets (Google Drive and Figma) to projects and tasks in tools like Asana or Motion.

There's a layer where them getting into task management and note taking build right within, I started feeling a bit conflicted with whether I should be using those native features, or our actual project management tool (Motion) and knowledge base software (Slite).

There's no hiding that we're quite fans of the best tool for the job, so that's where we start running into some conflict when apps start going the all-in-one software path, building out sometimes basic functionality to check some boxes. Don't get me wrong, Workona definitely isn't an all-in-one tool, they aren't trying to be that, I think it's just a result of what comes with building more of a shared workspace management tool.

Shift is a tool that I've tried incredibly hard to like over the past 7+ years. The day I first found it, I was so stoked with it, until learning that it didn't have all of the Chromium extension support.

They've since made major strides on that front and have most extensions now supported, but it's beginning to feel a bit like a relic from the past, and pales in comparison to that of the more recent entrants into the space like Arc Browser and SigmaOS. In-fact, comparing Shift alongside Sidekick Browser and you'll be sure to confuse them with one another.

I just have a tough time recommending them at this point, they really just allow for your favorite apps to be pinned on the sidebar and easy account switching with some quick action features.

They'd like to focus on the productivity users, but we feel like you can get most of the positives of Shift in your existing browser by utilizing a tool like Workona or Toby.

If you're unwilling to install a new browser, stopping to use your beloved Chrome, Safari, or Firefox, well, you'd be hard-pressed to even give this browser a shot. We just don't feel like it innovates enough to actually take over your primary browser replacement, especially when looking at Shift vs Arc Browser for example.