Easy Folders Alternative for ChatGPT & Claude in 2026
The honest comparison nobody else will write
Full disclosure up front: we make NorthLab Folders. That means you should weigh what follows with appropriate skepticism — we have an obvious interest in the outcome. What we can promise is that we will tell you the truth about Easy Folders, including the parts where it genuinely beats us, and we will tell you the truth about our own trade-offs, including the one that will send some readers straight back to Easy Folders. That is the only kind of comparison worth reading.
Easy Folders is a well-made extension. It solves a real problem — the total absence of any folder system in ChatGPT and Claude — with a clean, focused interface that does not try to be more than it is. It supports both ChatGPT and claude.ai, which matters more than it sounds: most folder tools pick one platform and ignore the other, leaving anyone who switches between the two AI assistants managing two completely different organisational systems. The free tier gives you three folders, which is enough to test whether folders actually change how you work. And the paid “Superuser” plan, which runs around nine dollars a month, adds cross-device sync — a genuine convenience that means your folder layout follows you from your laptop to your work machine without any manual effort. If that is the feature you need, Easy Folders delivers it, and we do not.
Where the two tools diverge
The fork in the road between Easy Folders and NorthLab Folders comes down to a single architectural decision: what happens to your metadata when you use the paid sync feature.
When you enable cross-device sync in Easy Folders, it uploads your folder names, conversation titles, and conversation URLs to its remote servers. The developers are transparent about this — they state clearly that they do not read conversation contents, and there is no reason to doubt that. But conversation titles are not neutral data. A title like “Treatment options for my mother’s diagnosis” or “Draft resignation letter for Monday” or “Legal advice for lease dispute” reveals things about your life that you may not have thought about when you named the conversation. Those titles, along with the folder names you chose and the URLs that tie them to specific sessions, live on a server you do not control, maintained by a company you are trusting to handle them responsibly both now and in the future. On the free tier, none of this happens — everything stays in local storage on your device. But the sync feature, which is the main reason to pay, changes that calculus.
NorthLab Folders takes a different position. Nothing — not even metadata like folder names or conversation titles — ever leaves your device. The extension stores only folder names and conversation IDs in your browser’s local storage. Message text is never touched. Our servers never see any of it. The only outbound network call the extension makes is a license check to Lemon Squeezy when you activate a Pro account; everything else is strictly local. This is not a marketing claim that obscures some edge case — it is the architecture, full stop.
The honest trade-off is that because we are strictly local-first, we cannot offer cross-device sync at all. Your folder layout lives on the device where you set it up. If you use ChatGPT on a work laptop and a personal Mac, you will maintain two separate organisational systems. Easy Folders’ paid sync solves this problem and NorthLab deliberately does not, because solving it would require holding your metadata on our servers, and we decided that was the wrong choice for a privacy-first tool. Some users will make the same call we did. Others will look at that trade-off and reasonably conclude that sync convenience matters more to them than metadata privacy — and for those users, Easy Folders is the better fit.
What else differs between the two
Beyond the privacy architecture, there are a few practical differences worth knowing.
Easy Folders does not support subfolders. Your hierarchy is flat: folders, and conversations inside them. NorthLab Folders offers depth-1 subfolders on the Pro plan, which means you can have a folder called “Work” with subfolders for individual clients or projects inside it. This is not nested infinitely — one level deep only — but it is enough for most people who want to separate categories from subcategories.
Safari support is the other meaningful gap. Easy Folders is Chromium-only: Chrome, Edge, Brave, and similar browsers, but not Safari. NorthLab Folders ships a signed and notarised Safari build for macOS, making it the only folder extension available on Safari that we are aware of. If your main browser is Safari — which is common on Mac — Easy Folders is simply not an option, and ChatGPT folders on Safari require a different solution entirely.
Both extensions support ChatGPT and Claude, which puts them ahead of most tools in this space that chose one platform and built around it. If you’re evaluating the broader landscape, our roundup of the best ChatGPT folder extensions covers more options.
Side-by-side at a glance
| Easy Folders | NorthLab Folders | |
|---|---|---|
| Folders | Yes | Yes |
| Subfolders | No | Yes (depth-1, Pro) |
| Claude support | Yes | Yes |
| Safari | No | Yes (macOS) |
| Local-first / data synced | Free tier: local only; Paid: metadata synced to servers | Strictly local-first; nothing synced ever |
| Free tier | 3 folders | 3 folders + pin, date stamps, copy-as-Markdown, single-chat export |
| Price | ~$9/mo (Superuser) | $4.99/mo · $39/yr · $79 lifetime |
Who should use which
Easy Folders is the right choice if cross-device sync is genuinely important to your workflow and you are comfortable with folder names and conversation titles being held on a third-party server under their privacy policy. It is a clean tool with a clear purpose, it supports both major AI platforms, and the sync feature works. Those are real strengths.
NorthLab Folders is worth considering if any of the following are true: you want zero metadata leaving your device under any circumstances; you use Safari on macOS; you want subfolders to add a second layer of organisation; or you want a lifetime purchase rather than an ongoing subscription. The privacy stance is the load-bearing difference — everything else is secondary to the fact that we simply do not receive your data, and we cannot change our minds about that later because there is no server to change.
The trade-off, stated plainly
Privacy and convenience are often in tension, and this comparison is a clean example of that. Easy Folders made a reasonable choice: offer sync, disclose what gets uploaded, let users decide. NorthLab made a different reasonable choice: never hold the data at all, accept that sync becomes impossible as a result.
Neither of these is obviously correct. The right answer depends on what you value more — the convenience of folders that follow you between devices, or the assurance that your folder names and conversation titles never touch someone else’s infrastructure. We think more people should ask that question before defaulting to sync, which is why we built the way we did. But we would rather you make an informed choice than a reflexive one.
If you want to see how the local-first approach feels in practice, NorthLab Folders has a free tier with no account required — three folders, no data leaving your device, no commitment. If you try it and decide the sync trade-off tips in Easy Folders’ favour, that is a completely reasonable conclusion.