Symbaloo has been around since 2007, which in start-page years is close to forever. If you're looking for something else, you're probably not looking because it broke. You're looking because it stopped fitting.
The export problem
Symbaloo will import your browser bookmarks. It will not hand them back.
There's no export button. When we looked, the only route out was a request through their support form — a ticket, not a download link, and not something you do on a Tuesday evening because you felt like tidying up.
A webmix with a hundred tiles represents real work. If moving means retyping a hundred URLs, most people don't move. They open a second thing and keep the first one around, and now they've got two half-homepages instead of one that works.
So whatever you switch to, do this first:
- Open each webmix and leave it open in a tab.
- Copy the links out somewhere plain — a text file, a note, anything. Tile labels are worth keeping; they're usually better than the page titles a tool will fetch for you.
- Only then start setting up the new thing.
If you'd rather not do it by hand, send the support request first and start the trial while you wait. The point is to not begin a migration you can't finish.
What Symbaloo is still good at
For the thing Symbaloo is actually built around now, it's hard to beat.
Most of its paid plans are education plans — classroom, library, district. If you're a teacher handing a curated set of sites to thirty students who each need to land on the same screen, Symbaloo is doing something the rest of us aren't even attempting. The public library of user-made webmixes is large, and browsing it doesn't require an account.
The tile grid also works for a certain kind of person. If your set is small enough to sit on one screen and you think in color and position rather than in names, tiles are faster to scan than any list.
Why you might outgrow it
There are three reasons, and an update won't fix any of them.
The free tier carries advertising. Banner ads and wallpaper ads. That's the deal being offered, and it's an ordinary one. It's also the first thing you notice on a page you look at forty times a day.
A grid is a screen. Tiles can be grouped — you drop one onto another — but the help pages only show that in a video, and we couldn't find anything in writing about how deep it goes. The thing that made twenty links fast makes two hundred links a filing problem.
And the export gap. You won't feel it until the day you decide to leave, which is the wrong day to find out.
What to ask before you pick something else
Two questions. They do more work than a feature comparison.
Can you get your data out? Ask before you put anything in. If a tool has an export button that produces a file you can read, that answers most of it. If the answer is a support form, assume whatever you build there stays there.
How many sites do you actually keep? Count honestly — not your bookmarks, the sites you open in a normal week. If that number is around ten, your browser's own new tab page is already enough and you can stop reading. If it's thirty or more, you need structure, and you'll want to look at what a tool does with the sites you only need occasionally.
Where Abunch fits
We make one of these, so read this part with that in mind.
Abunch is a personal homepage: your sites grouped into categories you name, on the page your browser opens to. Daily ones up front, the occasional ones on a second desktop a click away, so nothing has to be deleted to keep the front page calm. That second space is the thing we built the product around, so weigh it accordingly.
It imports browser bookmarks, and exports your categories and links as a JSON file on every plan, including the free one.
It's a list, not a grid. Categories with names, ordered how you want them. If tiles are what you liked about Symbaloo, you won't like this.
There are no ads. The free plan is a real homepage; what the paid plan adds is the second desktop and considerably more room. Current limits and prices are on the pricing page.
If you'd rather not start from an empty page, you can copy a ready-made collection and edit it. You own it from there.
Best for
Symbaloo, still: classrooms and shared screens, small sets, people who navigate by color and position.
Something else: anyone whose set has outgrown one screen, anyone who doesn't want advertising on the page they open forty times a day, and anyone who wants to be able to leave with their links in hand.
Either way, get your links out first.