uBlock Origin is gone from the Chrome Web Store. Google removed the last Manifest V2 extensions on 31 August 2026. Most lists you'll read today still tell you to install it. On Chrome, the replacement from the same project is uBlock Origin Lite.
Beyond that: Bitwarden has the most complete free tier of anything here (unlimited passwords, unlimited devices, open source). Toby is no longer the free unlimited tool older articles describe — 60 saved tabs since November 2024. Session Buddy is not abandoned, despite its reputation. And Grammarly's free tier is now drawn around a 100-AI-prompt quota, not the old feature split.
Disclosure, before anything else
We make browser extensions. Four of the 18 picks below are ours: FlashType, Convert: Web to PDF, Convert: Anything to PDF and ScrapeMaster. They are marked Ours wherever they appear, and each one lists its own limitations in the same place the third-party picks list theirs — including the ones that would put you off.
There are no affiliate links on this page and no star ratings. The Chrome Web Store cannot be read programmatically, so every rating and install count you see in roundups like this one was transcribed by hand at some point and may be badly out of date. Our own extensions have only a handful of reviews between them — presenting that as social proof would be silly.
How this was checked
Each entry was verified against the vendor's own pricing page, documentation or GitHub repository during the first week of September 2026. Free tiers move constantly and most roundups quietly inherit numbers from older roundups, which is how a list ends up recommending a product that changed its pricing two years ago.
Where a vendor doesn't publish something, this page says so rather than filling the gap. Raindrop's Pro price is rendered client-side and doesn't appear in the page source. Momentum documents what Plus adds but never states the free tier's caps. Notion doesn't publish the block limit that applies to multi-member workspaces. OneTab publishes no changelog or licence at all. In each case you'll see that noted instead of a number we can't stand behind.
That check changes entries both ways. Todoist was initially left out of this list because we could not confirm a Chrome extension from a Todoist-hosted page — its /downloads page renders that section client-side, so the link is invisible in the page source. It does exist, documented at todoist.com/integrations/apps/chrome, and it has been added.
Blocking and privacy
The category that changed most this year, and the reason a lot of recommendations you'll read elsewhere no longer work.
uBlock Origin Lite
A content blocker built on Chrome's Manifest V3 API. Operates declaratively, so there's no permanent filtering process running. Ships with uBlock Origin's own lists plus EasyList, EasyPrivacy and Peter Lowe's list.
PriceFree
Open sourceGPL-3.0
Worth knowingThis is the Chrome-installable successor, not classic uBlock Origin. The project publishes both; only this one is on the Chrome Web Store. We are not going to enumerate specific feature gaps against classic uBO, because the project doesn't document them in a form we can cite.
uBlock Origin (classic) — no longer installable on Chrome
The wide-spectrum content blocker that was the default recommendation in this category for a decade.
PriceFree
Open sourceGPL-3.0
Worth knowingRemoved from the Chrome Web Store. The project's own README marks the Chromium row "Removed" and cites Google's timeline: all remaining Manifest V2 extensions were pulled from the Chrome Web Store on 31 August 2026. It is still actively developed — 1.74.0 shipped 25 August 2026 — and still available for Firefox, Edge and Opera. Listed here only because most articles still recommend installing it on Chrome, which you can no longer do.
Reading and focus
Making the browser less hostile to actually reading something.
Dark Reader
Generates a dark mode for sites that don't ship one, analysing each page rather than inverting it.
PriceFree to install; the project asks for voluntary payment
Open sourceMIT
Worth knowingShips a dedicated Chrome MV3 manifest, so it is unaffected by the Manifest V2 removal. Whether the separate Safari app is paid, we could not verify — don't assume the desktop price carries over.
Momentum
Replaces the new-tab page with a focus prompt, to-do list, weather and your links.
PriceFreemium — Plus is $4.95/month or $39.95/year, with a 7-day trial
Free tierThe core start page is free: daily focus prompt, to-do list, weather, links, quotes, backgrounds.
Worth knowingPlus is where the integrations live — Pomodoro, site blocker, task-tool sync, Notes and AI. Momentum publishes what Plus adds but not the free tier's numeric caps, so we can't tell you exactly how many task lists or link groups you get free.
Tab management
Three tools with genuinely different philosophies, and the one place where a pricing change has quietly invalidated a lot of older advice.
OneTab
Collapses all open tabs into a single list page. The vendor's line is "Save up to 95% memory and reduce tab clutter."
PriceFree — no paid tier documented anywhere on the official site
Worth knowingRead this before installing: the official help says "Uninstalling OneTab will cause your browser to delete your stored tabs." Cloud sync is described as coming, not shipped. OneTab publishes no changelog, version history or licence, so we cannot tell you when it was last updated or whether it has moved to Manifest V3.
Session Buddy
Saves and restores whole browsing sessions as named collections.
PriceFree, donation-supported. No signup required.
Worth knowingWidely assumed to be abandoned; it isn't. v4.1.2 shipped 27 April 2026, v4.2 is listed as coming, and the public roadmap was updated in August 2026. There is a visible gap in the release history (mid-2024 to early 2025), which is probably where the reputation came from.
Toby
A visual workspace that organises saved links into boards rather than a flat list.
PriceFreemium — Productivity is $4.50/member/month billed yearly ($54/year), Team is $8/member/month yearly ($96/year)
Free tierStarter is free and capped at 60 saved tabs.
Worth knowingIf you've read that Toby is free and unlimited, that advice predates 12 November 2024, when it introduced paid plans and moved existing users onto the capped Starter tier. Sixty tabs is a real ceiling for the workflow Toby is designed around.
Writing and typing
Two proofreaders with very different free tiers, and a text expander — which is ours.
Grammarly
Grammar, spelling and tone checking across most web text fields.
PriceFreemium — the paid individual tier is called Plus
Free tierThe free plan lists exactly three things: write without spelling and grammar mistakes, see your writing tone, and generate text with 100 AI prompts.
Worth knowingThe free/paid split is now drawn around AI prompt quotas — 100 free against 2,000 on Plus — rather than the older "basic vs advanced suggestions" framing you'll still see quoted. Sentence rewrites, tone adjustment and plagiarism detection are Plus-only. Prices are region-specific, so check your own.
LanguageTool
Multilingual grammar, style and punctuation checking.
PriceFreemium
Free tier2,000 characters per text field, all languages and dialects, personal dictionary.
Open sourceCore is LGPL 2.1 or later; premium checks are not in the open core
Worth knowingPremium raises the per-field limit to 150,000 characters — the free cap is the thing to test against your actual documents. We could not read current prices; the pricing page failed to render them when we checked.
FlashTypeOurs
A text expander: type a short shortcut, get the whole message. Fill-in fields, live dates, rich text, and over a thousand templates.
PriceFree — no snippet cap, no paid tier, no account needed to start
Worth knowingOurs, so weigh it accordingly. It's a new listing with no Chrome Web Store reviews yet. Snippets are stored locally by default; an optional Google sign-in syncs them across your own devices, so it isn't a zero-network tool. The Google Docs canvas isn't supported.
Passwords
One has the most generous free tier in the category; the other has no free tier at all.
Bitwarden
Password manager with browser, mobile and desktop apps.
PriceFreemium — Premium $1.65/month billed annually ($19.80/year); Families $3.99/month ($47.88/year)
Free tierUnlimited devices and unlimited passwords, plus free sharing with one other user.
Open sourceYes — clients default to GPL-3.0, server to AGPL-3.0, with a small Bitwarden-licensed directory
Worth knowingThe unlimited-device free tier is real and unusual. Premium adds the integrated authenticator, file attachments, emergency access and vault health reports.
1Password
Password manager with a polished browser extension.
PricePaid only — Individual $2.99/month billed annually, Families $4.49/month annually. 14-day free trial.
Worth knowingThere is no free tier. Worth stating plainly because it's the main practical difference from Bitwarden. Its /pricing page no longer shows consumer plans at all — those live on the personal page.
Saving and capturing
Getting things out of the browser and somewhere you'll find them again. Two of these four are ours.
Raindrop.io
Bookmark manager with collections, tags and highlights.
PriceFreemium — monthly or yearly with roughly a 20% yearly discount
Free tierGenuinely generous: unlimited bookmarks, collections, tags, collaborators and sync devices on both plans. The free limits are on uploads — 100 MB/month and 100 MB per file.
Worth knowingPro adds full-text search, web archiving, annotations, a broken-link checker and daily backups. We can't quote a Pro price: the pricing page renders amounts client-side and no figure appears in the served page.
Notion Web Clipper
Saves any page into a Notion database.
PriceBundled with Notion — Free $0, Plus $10/member/month, Business $20/member/month
Free tier5 MB file uploads, 10 external guests, 7-day page history.
Worth knowingOnly useful if you already live in Notion. Notion doesn't publish the numeric block cap that applies once a workspace has two or more members, so we can't tell you what it is.
Convert: Web to PDFOurs
One-click webpage-to-PDF that produces real text PDFs rather than screenshots, and works on pages behind a login.
PriceFree — no watermark, no paid tier
Worth knowingOurs. Chromium only — Firefox and Safari aren't supported because the underlying APIs differ. The conversion itself runs locally, and after each successful conversion the extension sends one anonymous ping containing a random install token so we can count daily conversions. Infinite-scroll pages need scrolling to your endpoint first.
Convert: Anything to PDFOurs
Drop in images, text, markup or CSV and get an unwatermarked PDF, with multi-file merge.
PriceFree
Worth knowingOurs. File conversion runs entirely on-device with no uploads. Excel files aren't read directly — export to CSV first. Encrypted and password-protected sources can't be opened, and animated GIFs contribute only their first frame.
Tasks
One pick, and the free tier's real limit is not the one most articles quote.
Todoist
Task manager whose extension does more than quick-add: right-click any page or selected text to save it as a hyperlinked task, turn a Gmail thread into a task without leaving the inbox, and open your whole list from the toolbar popup.
PriceFreemium — Pro $7/month or $60/year; Business $10/user/month, or $8 billed yearly
Free tierThe free tier is called Beginner: 5 active projects, 3 filters, 1 week of activity history, 5 MB uploads.
Worth knowingThe widely-quoted "300 tasks" limit is not a free-tier restriction — it is a per-project cap that applies on every plan including Business. The real free ceiling is 5 projects. The extension itself is not gated: Todoist lists it as available on Beginner, Pro and Business alike.
Recording
One pick, with a free tier worth understanding before you rely on it.
Loom
Records screen, camera and audio from the browser, with transcription in 50+ languages.
PriceFreemium — Business $18/user/month, Business + AI $24/user/month
Free tierThe Starter plan is free: 25 videos per member and a 5-minute cap per recording.
Worth knowingThe 25-video limit is per member and is a hard ceiling — you upgrade or you stop. Loom is now an Atlassian product and its official documentation lives on Atlassian's support site.
Getting data out of pages
We cover this category in depth separately, so here is the one pick and a pointer.
ScrapeMasterOurs
Side-panel scraper that auto-detects repeating data on a page, walks pagination and detail pages, and exports CSV, XLSX, JSON or straight to Google Sheets.
PriceFree — no row limits, no paid tier
Worth knowingOurs, and it has only a handful of public reviews so far, which is not much evidence either way. Extraction is local, but auto-detect sends the page's HTML structure to our analysis API, so it is not a fully local tool. It doesn't rotate proxies, and it can't get past paywalls, logins or CAPTCHAs.
A note on data extraction
We kept this list to one scraper deliberately, because we already cover that category properly elsewhere — including tools we don't make. If pulling structured data out of pages is the job, start with the data-collection roundup or the Instant Data Scraper comparison, which explains why that once-default tool changed hands.
Common questions
Why isn't uBlock Origin on this list as a Chrome extension?
Because you can no longer install it on Chrome. Google removed all remaining Manifest V2 extensions from the Chrome Web Store on 31 August 2026, and uBlock Origin's own README now marks its Chromium row as removed. The project is still very much alive — version 1.74.0 shipped on 25 August 2026 — and still available for Firefox, Edge and Opera. On Chrome, uBlock Origin Lite is the Manifest V3 successor from the same project.
How many of these extensions do you make?
Four of them: FlashType, Convert: Web to PDF, Convert: Anything to PDF and ScrapeMaster. They are labelled on the page and each one lists its own drawbacks alongside the third-party picks. We would rather tell you that than have you find out.
Why are there no star ratings or install counts?
Because we cannot verify them. The Chrome Web Store cannot be read programmatically, so any rating or install figure in a roundup like this has been copied by hand at some point and may be months stale. Our own extensions have only a handful of reviews between them, which is not evidence worth presenting either.
What is the best free productivity Chrome extension?
For most people, a password manager is the one with the largest return, and Bitwarden's free tier is unusually complete — unlimited passwords across unlimited devices, open source. After that it depends on what you do all day: Dark Reader if you read a lot, a text expander if you type the same things repeatedly, uBlock Origin Lite for blocking.
How current is this list?
Every price, free-tier limit and licence was checked against the vendor's own pricing page, documentation or GitHub repository in the first week of September 2026. Where a vendor does not publish a number — Raindrop's Pro price, Momentum's free-tier caps, Notion's block limit — this page says so instead of guessing. Free tiers move often, so treat anything here as a prompt to check rather than a guarantee.
If you install only three
Bitwarden, because a password manager is the highest return on effort in this whole category and its free tier has no device limit. uBlock Origin Lite, because blocking is the other thing that improves every page you visit and the classic version is no longer an option here. Dark Reader if you read for a living, or a text expander if you type the same paragraphs for one.
Everything else on this page is worth having only if it matches how you actually work. A tab manager you don't open is worse than no tab manager, and a free tier you outgrow in a week is a trial with better marketing.