Bokal › cookie editor alternative
A Cookie-Editor alternative for developers who read the permissions
An honest comparison. Cookie-Editor is a good tool with around 2 million users, and most of what people assume separates it from Bokal turns out not to. Here is what actually does.
Last updated 26 August 2026. Competitor details below were verified against published manifests and repositories on that date.
Let us kill three myths first, because we checked. Cookie-Editor is also GPL-3.0 open source (about 1.7k GitHub stars). It has been Manifest V3 since March 2022. And it has used optional_host_permissions rather than install-time site access since August 2023. So "open source", "MV3" and "no install-time host permissions" are not reasons to prefer Bokal. Anyone telling you otherwise has not read its manifest.
What actually differs
| Bokal | Cookie-Editor | |
|---|---|---|
tabs permission | Not requested — uses activeTab | Requested |
| "Read your browsing history" at install | No | Yes (consequence of tabs) |
| Install-time site access | None — optional grant | None — optional grant |
| Licence | GPL-3.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Manifest version | MV3 | MV3 |
| CHIPS partitioned cookies | Partition inspector | No partitionKey handling |
Playwright storageState export | Yes | No |
Puppeteer setCookie export | Yes | No |
| Users | Small and new | ~2 million, 4.4★ |
| Browsers | Chrome / Chromium | Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, Safari |
The permission difference, precisely
This is the whole of it. Cookie-Editor's published Chrome manifest requests:
"permissions": ["cookies", "tabs", "storage", "sidePanel"]Bokal's requests:
"permissions": ["cookies", "storage", "sidePanel", "unlimitedStorage", "alarms", "activeTab"]The meaningful delta is tabs versus activeTab. The tabs permission grants read access to the URL and title of every tab, continuously — which is why Chrome shows "Read your browsing history" on the install screen. activeTab grants a temporary capability for the single tab you are on, and only after you click the extension's toolbar button.
For a cookie editor, neither design is wrong. Cookie-Editor uses tabs to know which site you are looking at. Bokal gets the same information from activeTab at the cost of requiring a click first. If you would rather not grant standing visibility into every tab, that is the reason to choose Bokal, and it is visible before you install either one.
Where Cookie-Editor is the better choice
Being straight about this, because a comparison page that concludes "we win everything" is not worth reading:
- Browser coverage. Cookie-Editor ships for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera and Safari. Bokal is Chrome and Chromium only today.
- Track record. ~2 million users and 4.4★ from over 400 ratings, over many years. Bokal launched in July 2026 and is tiny by comparison.
- It is free and open source too. There is no ethical upgrade being offered here. If the browsing-history warning does not bother you and you do not need partitioned cookies or automation export, Cookie-Editor is a perfectly good answer and we would rather you used a good tool than switched for no reason.
Where Bokal is the better choice
- You work with CHIPS / partitioned cookies. Bokal has a partition inspector; Cookie-Editor's codebase contains no
partitionKeyhandling, so partitioned cookies are effectively invisible to it. - You write Playwright or Puppeteer tests. Bokal exports a site's cookies directly as Playwright
storageState, a PlaywrightaddCookiesarray, or a PuppeteersetCookiearray. See the how-to. - You do not want the browsing-history permission. Covered above.
- You juggle several logged-in accounts on one site. The optional Pro tier stores named cookie profiles locally and restores a saved set into the live session in one click.
Switching
Bokal reads Cookie-Editor's JSON export directly. Export from Cookie-Editor, open Bokal on the same site, press Import, and pick the file. Nothing else is required, and nothing is uploaded anywhere in either direction.
Try Bokal
Free and open source (GPL-3.0). No account, no telemetry, no install-time site access.