So, you’re looking for the best Chrome Extensions for students.
These are the must-have apps you need in 2023. Obviously, you don’t need all of them. Not every single one will be helpful for every single student.
But you’ll be able to snag a few of them off this list and find it helpful, so it may be worth your time to use one of these extensions to save (a lot more) time in the future!
This list was compiled based on personal input and dozens of reviews all around the web. If you’re a student in college, high school, or even elementary school, you’ll find something on this list that’ll help you out.
Increase productivity, efficiency, and get more done (and boost your grades also) with these awesome Chrome extensions handpicked just for students.
Ready? Let’s roll.
Last updated: 2/24/23. Updated the list of student apps for 2023.
These Chrome extensions are still some of the most useful essentials that any college student can take advantage of. With online classrooms becoming the norm for students, these extensions should offer value.
LastPass
LastPass is probably the most time-saving Chrome extension on this list.
Some of you probably already heard a lot about it. Some of you probably already use it. It’s a password manager that saves you time by remembering all your login credentials across all your devices- securely.
Going into 2023, students are taking online classes and these apps can help manage their multitude of accounts online. Now you have students signing up for various online web-based apps and software with dozens of accounts. Remembering all those user credentials and associated passwords? A nightmare. Not to mention rehashing the same iterations of your password for every site is a poor security choice.
That’s where a password manager comes into play.
Got a weak password?
As you probably know, it’s best practices to make up a secure and unique password for every single account you have online. This means using a combination of characters, numbers, casing, and special characters. But do you really have time to memorize all these passwords and tie them to a login username as well?
Generates strong passwords that you never have to remember again
That’s where LastPass comes in.
It’ll automatically generate a secure password for you to use and prompt you whenever you visit a site with a saved password so you can quickly log in. You just need a single click and it’ll automatically log you in, which saves you a ton of time. It saves these credentials in a secure “Vault” (they actually call it that) and no one can access it but you (not even the company itself), so you’ll have peace of mind when doing so.
All you need is a master password to remember and it’ll automatically take care of everything else across all your devices, which makes it super easy to use.
You can even add existing passwords to it and it can generate new stronger passwords to replace weaker ones so you’ll always have a strong password. You’ll never forget another password and never have to memorize more than one- ever again.
Weak ones are flagged automatically and so are duplicate ones so you can take measure to protect your online security.
In fact, you can check your generated passwords with this tool to see if they’re strong in case you’re paranoid.
Free password management and one of the best
Try out LastPass here. It’s one of the best Chrome extensions for password management out there, which is why it’s on this list. It saves you time, headache, and makes your passwords stronger. What more could you want? Free to use? It does that too.
Let’s face it.
You’re going to create a ton of user account for the many sites you come across. This just makes the whole process a lot easier (and secure).
It takes away the headache of having to remember so many accounts for the different websites you sign up for during your classes, so why not save yourself some time (and headache)? It’s a no-brainer. (And free.)
Chrome Browser does have a built-in password generator, but then again, it’s limited to just your Google Account. For everything else across your other devices (and non-Google products), this password generator doesn’t work. This is why LastPass can be super useful.
Screencastify
Next, we have a screen recorder called Screencastify. Screencastify lets you record and capture your screen instantly.
And it doesn’t cost you a penny to use.
I know. This isn’t for everyone. But some people need to record their screen or share it for collaborative projects. This can be useful for presentations, tutorials, studying remotely, or just group work. When you need to record your Chromebook desktop, this is the extension to use.
Records with narration and webcam integrated automatically
You can record your desktop, browser, or webcam and narrate it with your built-in microphone.
You can also embed your webcam into the recording so the viewer can see both your screen and yourself. It also lets you customize the FPS and resolution to free up system resources and help out those who have slower connections so it’s very user-friendly.
It’s also got built-in screen tools like annotations, spotlights, and cropping/trimming your video. Your videos can be automatically saved to Google Drive, YouTube, locally, or even exported as an .MP4 or GIF.
It’s super easy to use and it just works. The next time you need to share your screen on your Chromebook, get Screencastify.
With distance learning firmly taking its place as the new norm (for now), recording your screen makes it easier for collaboration projects, tutorial videos for teachers, or recording various assignments.
Now you can quickly show how to do something by video rather than typing it through Slack. No need to video or audio call either. No need to worry about bothering your peers. Just record, edit, and send the upload link for them to check it out. It’s simple, efficient, and as streamlined as can be.
I wrote a whole review about Screencastify if you want to learn more.
Get Screencastify here.
StayFocusd
Next up is an extension that helps you study. StayFocusd is a Chrome extension that’ll help you out if you have ADD-like tendencies (or actually have it) and can’t stay focused on one task.
I’ve already written a review answering the age-old question if StayFocusd really works (it does).
Remember those website filters back in elementary school that they used to block sites you shouldn’t be going to? Well, StayFocusd is kind of like that. It’s basically an extension that’ll block all time-wasting sites and only allow you to visit productive sites.
Customize it to your study habits
It’s a highly configurable extension that lets you choose which sites you want to block and for how long.
You can choose to block an entire site or just a specific page on it all the way to specific content on that page (like a game, image, or video). That’s pretty cool. After the timer’s up, you’re blocked from accessing your blacklisted sites until the allotted productivity period is up. Then you can go back to it.
StayFocusd is awesome. You can customize everything from the maximum time allowed for you to screw around on Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.
You can even change the active hours and the daily reset time. It’s even got a “nuclear option” which blocks all sites for a specific number of hours independent of your active days and hours.
And there’s absolutely no way to unblock this option once you start it. Got a midterm tomorrow? Nuke ‘em!
Update: This is still one of the best apps for focus that you can possibly get as a Chrome extension. The app is still being updated and new features are added.
Check out StayFocusd.
Evernote Web Clipper
Next, we have Evernote. If you live on Earth, you’ve heard of Evernote.
It’s the world’s most popular note-taking app. The Evernote Web Clipper lets you clip anything you see on the web to your Evernote notebook.
This means you don’t need bookmarks, right-clicking to save images, downloading articles, saving tabs, pinning stuff, or any of that time-wasting nonsense.
This extension will let you clip any article or web page on the Internet to any specific notebook in your account. You can also assign tags to it like “research paper, book report, shopping list, etc.” for easy lookup later. It also syncs across all your devices so you can quickly look at whatever you just clipped from the web.
Clips everything for later viewing
The clipping feature works.
There’s no issue with it and I haven’t come across anything I couldn’t clip. You can even sleet to clip a small section or the entire page- or a simplified version of the article you’re reading. You can also bookmark it for later reference and even take a screenshot of the current page.
It also lets you use the built-in highlighter to mark text that you deem important, and you can use text and visual callouts to write quick notes on the side. You can also share your clips with your friends or colleagues with a customized URL short link.
The clips can be customized into Gmail and LinkedIn as well.
If you have an Evernote account, get Evernote Web Clipper. If you don’t have an account, get one here. And then get the extension. It’s totally worth it and will save you tons of time. It’s useful for projects, group work, to-do lists, and just about anything else. And even your daily routine. Evernote is king.
Get Evernote Web Clipper here.
Grammarly
You’ve probably seen at least a dozen Grammarly ads by now. This extension is a powerful, AI-based grammar checker for everything you type online. They’ve recently added nifty little features that really take it to the next level. Spellcheck your emails, Google Docs, and even your online messages.
Time for some grammar checking. Grammarly is a free spell-checker that automatically checks for hundreds of spelling and grammar errors in your text in real-time- for free!
Get read receipts for Gmail
It works by checking your input and underlining any grammatical mistakes and helps you understand what’s wrong with your grammar or punctuation. When you hover over it, it’ll tell you what’s wrong with it and how to fix it so you can get a near-perfect paper
It can correct misspelled words, detect words in the wrong context, fix homophones and other commonly confused words. It can also fix hundreds of complex grammatical errors like subject/verb agreement, articles, modifier placement, and more.
If you’re a student, teacher, professional, editor, typist, or even just a writer, this Chrome extension is a must-have. It’ll adapt to your writing style to learn how you type and minimize mistakes in your content and lets you feel confident in your work.
It’s really the best spell checker I’ve ever used and I’ve used pretty much all the leading ones including Ginger and Grammar Base.
It’s accurate, recognizes spelling discrepancies between phrases, and can simplify your complex sentences. No other spellchecker comes close from my experience. The only runner-up is Google Doc’s built-in checker.
They do have a premium version if you like it enough to buy it, but the free version is amazing enough to catch the majority of everyday typos in your essays, emails, posts, social shares, and everyday forms. It works with Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and pretty much everywhere a student wanders online.
Doesn’t Works with Google Docs or Google products!
The one caveat I have with Grammarly is that it doesn’t work with Google Docs, or any Google Suite product, for that matter.
So I have to type up an article (like this one), in Docs and then spell check it with Google’s built-in checker. It’s okay, but it misses a lot of typos. I then copy and paste the same article into an online form and correct it again with Grammarly.
Update: Grammarly now works with Docs! Plus, it’s got full integration with editing tools if you need it.
It catches a lot of spelling errors that the native spell checker misses, so it’s definitely saved my rear end a few times. But that doesn’t mean what you’re reading is perfect. It just minimizes the chance of a typo slipping by to the final draft!
This is one of the best Chrome extensions a student can take advantage of in 2023, and beyond.
Check out Grammarly.
Email tracking for Gmail
Next up is a free email tracker for Chrome and it’s one of the essentials. This thing lets you track emails you send to other people (whether they have the same extension or not) and lets you know if the emails you sent have been read or not.
It’s just like the “read” checkmark on WhatsApp or the “seen” feature on Facebook Messenger. Email tracking for Gmail lets you know a whole slew of information, including:
- Checking when your email was first read
- Seeing when your email was last read
- Seeing who read your email
- Checking what device they used to read it
- The total number of times your email was read and by who
And it’s completely free to use. How awesome is that? Bam.
It gives you a green checkmark to show that it’s been sent successfully and a double-green check mark to let you know it’s been read. If you’re a WhatsApp user, you already know how it works.
Useful for students, professionals, and even casual users
This is useful for students because it’ll let you know if your peers got your email and if they read it. This way, you don’t need to ask “did you get my email?” or “did you read my message?” anymore. Forever.
No more being that one colleague with all the paranoid questions. And if you know someone else like that, send this article to them and have them download the Chrome extension.
If you’re a student and you use Gmail, you need this extension. It’s one of the best Chrome extensions for students whose primary means of communication is through email- which probably like 99.9999% of any modern-day student. And 34% of statistics are made up on the spot.
Get Email Tracker here.
The Great Suspender
And now something for the techies. If you have a lot of tabs open at one time in Chrome (who doesn’t?), you’ll definitely get your money’s worth with this extension.
The Great Suspender is an extension that automatically “suspends” tabs that inactive.
This means tabs that you have opened but you’re not currently using. It’ll automatically shut them down while keeping the placeholder there. When you need to see the page again, just click anywhere on the page and it’ll reload it tab instantly. It only takes a single click to reload the page and get back to where you were.
Remember, the tab doesn’t get closed. It’s still in your tab bar, so don’t get confused. It just gets suspended temporarily until you need it again to save you time.
So, why is this helpful?
Each tab in Chrome is its own separate process. This is so if a single tab crashes, you won’t lose all the other tabs. Wouldn’t that be annoying? But the problem with this kind of design is that having multiple tabs will drain your computer’s resources like crazy.
If you’re on a Chromebook, this is even more apparent since they’re not that powerful in the hardware department.
Speed up Chrome
The Great Suspender will spend inactive tabs to free up system resources and improve your computer’s performance and speed it up. By suspending inactive, including tabs, it’ll help boost your computer’s performance by returning free resources that were previously assigned to Chrome.
And if you’re on a laptop or Chromebook, or any laptop for that matter, it’ll also slow down battery drain and make it run longer.
Customize everything
The extension is fully customizable so you can change the settings to suit your needs.
You can choose which sites to never suspend, automatically suspend all tabs, automatically refresh all tabs, choose how long to wait before suspending a tab, and it’ll also not suspend tabs where you’re typing in information- like a form or essay so you don’t lose your work.
It saves you time, battery, electricity, and system resources to improve your computer’s performance.
And, you’ll always get your money’s worth- because it’s free!
This is a must-have for any student who uses Chrome. It’s an essential extension.
Check out The Great Suspender here.
Update: TGS has been removed from the Chrome Web Store. This feature is now built into ChromeOS. It can suspend tabs that are idle on its own!
Session Buddy
This ones for anyone who uses Chrome. Session Buddy is an awesome little Chrome extension that saves your tabs for your next session of Chrome!
It lets you quickly metabolize all your current tabs and restore them in a single click for continuing where you left off. This is useful for when you just have too many tabs at one time and you need to work on another project or do something else entirely. Just save the entire session and do what you gotta do. Then come back and restore it.
Save all your Chrome tabs in a single click
Session Buddy saves all your tabs to their current windows and lets you launch tab-by-tab, or window-by-window, or all possible tabs/windows at the same time! This can reduce clutter, help you get organized, and even save system resources since you should know by now that Chrome is a system resource hog. You can even save your tabs to a clipboard for export.
Session Buddy is completely free-to-use and won’t cost you a penny. If you’re a student that’s looking for a way to organize Chrome tabs, Session Buddy is your best buddy!
This saves you a ton of time and removes the need to bookmark or reopen all your tabs again so you can get on with your projects. A huge benefit to any student who multitasks between tabs in Chrome.
Get Session Buddy.
Todoist
Next, we have an extension for the busy student. Todoist is a workflow manager that helps you organize your everything so you can try to get your tasks in control!
You can organize and prioritize your work with tasks, subtasks, task priorities, and everything in between. Set times, dates, contacts, and even collaborate with others. If you have a lot of deadlines and time-sensitive projects, appointments, meetings, or other things, you need Todoist.
The best part about it is that you can color-code your tasks. I do this for everything and use a tone of blue (low priority) to an annoying color like orange for top-priority tasks. This way, I’ll get them done for sure just to get that annoying color out of my line of vision.
For those that like to color code their to-do lists, this is like that x10.
10x is the new thing. 10x this. 10x efforts. 10x results. Right? Or have I been watching just too many Gary V. videos.
Easy to use
Todoist is very easy to use and learn.
You can use it for the simplest to-do lists like daily routines to even the most complex projects (like long-term projects, presentations, or collaborative work). It’s flexible and very adaptable so you don’t need to waste time learning how to use it. It also syncs across more than ten platforms as well, so you access your to-do list anytime, anywhere.
And if you need to work in a group, you can easily share anything and communicate with a cinch. You can assign tasks, leave comments, and even get instant notification from your peers when someone leaves a comment or completes a task. It’s like Google Hangouts on a to-do list, but with a lot more functionality.
Gamify your progress
Another cool thing is that it has this “point” system that allows you to garner up rewards and “gamify” your productivity.
If you meet your goals, you can see it all mapped out with charts and graphics and beautiful data to show your progress. It’s really awesome to see your work visualized. You don’t actually earn anything but virtual points though. But still. It’s cool how it works and it really does make you want to not miss a goal.
And it’s completely free to use with the option of an upgraded version, but I found that the free version is well-beyond what I need to use it for. If you like it enough, you can upgrade your plan and unlock some extreme task management software.
It’s my favorite to-do list extension so far in 2018 and 2019. It’s probably the best Chrome extension for managing to-do lists and workflow I’ve used this year, so I thought it deserves a spot on this list of the must-have apps for students.
I mean, if you’re a student swamped with homework, classwork, projects, reports, group work, and everything else in between, Todoist will be something you’ll want to get as an essential app so you can manage your hectic lifestyle. It’s an excellent extension for students who use lists for everything, which is pretty much everyone nowadays. And in 2019, who doesn’t?
Check out Todoist.
History Eraser
Lastly, we have something to save you some time. History Eraser is an awesome little extension that takes care of doing the dirty work for you in a single click so you don’t waste time doing it yourself and clicking tons of buttons.
You know when you’ve been browsing stuff that’s kind of private and you don’t want it to show up your search history? Instead of manually clearing it, History Erase will do it for you (and then some). It makes it super easy to remove everything from your browsing history on Chrome, including:
- Clear browsing history
- Deleting the cache
- Clearing saved password
- Deleting local storage
- Delete indexed databases
- Empty application cache
- Clear download history
- Delete all cookies
- Clear saved form data
- Delete webSQL databases
- Erase file systems
- Delete plugin data
And you can even customize to do things like close all tabs before clearing, close apps before clearing, or even reloading all tabs before cleaning. You can also have it close Chrome entirely after you obliterate all your search history in a single click.
It also allows you the option to choose what you want to delete- anything from a single item to multiple items across the timespan of days to months to years. It’s all up to you and you’re in control. It’s lightweight and super easy to use, which means no time wasted learning how to use it effectively. And it’s even got preset settings for those who aren’t technically inclined and just want a history cleaning extension that just works. Instantly.
It’s free to use and doesn’t cost you anything to try out. You can check it out here on the Chrome Web Store.
(Want an alternative to History Eraser? Check out Click&Clean.)
The must-have, best Chrome extensions for students
And, there you have it!
This list covers some of the best extensions a student can have in their arsenal to ace those classes and get better grades.
With these extensions, you can improve your workflow and work more productively and efficiently. You should be able to add an app or two to Chrome and benefit from it.
And they’re all free to use, so you can instantly use them to your advantage immediately at no cost (other than some time).
If you have any other awesome apps for students to suggest, leave a comment and I’ll check it out. And if you’ve found this list to be helpful, let me know as well. Consider telling a fellow peer about it to benefit both of you =].
Thanks for reading.
Highly recommend “LastPass” and “Grammarly”. “Awesome Screenshot: Screen Video Recorder” may be a better option than “Screencastify”(plus it has better reviews). “History Eraser” is fine, but “Click&Clean” is a lot better since it will notify you when you have taken up a lot of storage and record your browsing history that is much easier to access than “History Eraser”. They are both created by the same company though, so both are fine.