Best YouTube Focus Extensions in 2026 (Ranked Honestly)

Best free option — the gold standard. If you install one thing from this list, make it Unhook. It's free, open source, and used by more than 800,000 people, and it has earned that reach. Unhook gives you granular on/off toggles for nearly every distracting surface on YouTube: the homepage feed, Shorts, the sidebar recommendations, end-screen cards, comments, the trending tab, notifications, and more. You flip on exactly what bothers you and leave the rest alone, so a clean homepage doesn't have to mean a stripped-down watch page.

Pros: completely free with no paywalled core features; transparent open-source code you can audit; a huge, active user base, which means bugs get caught and YouTube layout changes get patched quickly; lightweight and fast; an optional Pro tier exists but you never need it. Cons: every toggle is just a toggle — there's no focus lock, commitment mode, or password gate, so in a weak moment you can switch the homepage back on in one second. There's no Pomodoro timer and no focus-time tracking, so Unhook removes temptation but doesn't actively coach your attention.

Who it's for: almost everyone, as a starting point. If your problem is "the homepage and Shorts derail me" and you trust yourself not to re-enable them, Unhook solves it for free, today. Install note: search "Unhook" on the Chrome Web Store (it's also on Firefox and Edge). Set it up in two minutes by toggling off the homepage, Shorts and sidebar. Only move down this list if you specifically need a lock you can't talk yourself out of, a built-in timer, or time tracking — features Unhook deliberately leaves out.

Best if you want every feature and don't mind a subscription. UnTrap is the maximalist option. It does everything Unhook does and then keeps going: extremely fine-grained control over the homepage, search results, watch page, Shorts, comments and recommendations, plus custom themes, layout tweaks, and a long tail of niche toggles most people will never touch but power users adore. If your idea of a good time is bending YouTube's interface to your exact preferences, nothing here gives you more knobs to turn.

Pros: the deepest, most configurable feature set on this list; custom theming and layout control that go well beyond simple distraction blocking; frequent updates. Cons: the price. UnTrap is a $5.99-per-month subscription with no one-time option, which works out to $71.88 a year, every year, for a browser extension — more than fourteen times CleanFeed's one-time price annually. There's no commitment lock or Pomodoro timer here either — UnTrap is about customization, not enforced discipline. The sheer number of settings can also overwhelm if you just want a clean feed.

Who it's for: tinkerers and power users who treat their browser as a workshop, value maximum control over every pixel of the YouTube UI, and are comfortable paying a recurring fee for ongoing development. Store note: available on the Chrome Web Store; the subscription is handled in-extension. If you'd resent paying $72 a year on autopilot, or you mainly want focus enforcement rather than theming, look at a pay-once tool instead. UnTrap is brilliant and genuinely overkill for most people.

Best lightweight option. DF Tube is the minimalist's pick. Where Unhook and UnTrap hand you a control panel of toggles, DF Tube takes a more opinionated, set-and-forget approach: install it, and it quietly strips the most distracting surfaces — the homepage feed, related-video sidebar, comments, and autoplay — without asking you to configure much. It does less than the tools above, on purpose, and that simplicity is the point.

Pros: dead simple, with almost no setup; very light on resources; the free tier covers the big distractions most people care about; a paid tier unlocks a few extras. It's been around long enough to be reliable. Cons: it's less granular than Unhook, so if you want surgical control over individual elements you'll feel boxed in. Critically, there's no lock mechanism — nothing stops you disabling it the moment willpower dips — and no Pomodoro timer or focus-time tracking.

Who it's for: people who find Unhook's wall of toggles overwhelming and just want a clean YouTube with zero fuss, and who trust themselves to leave it on. Store note: search "DF Tube" on the Chrome Web Store; the core is free and you can ignore the upgrade entirely. If you later want fine-grained control or a commitment lock you'll outgrow it, but as a frictionless starting point it's hard to beat for ease.

Best for channel-specific blocking. BlockTube solves a different problem than the others. Instead of hiding YouTube's UI surfaces, it specializes in blocking specific channels, videos, and keywords outright, supporting filter lists and regular-expression matching by channel name and keyword. If certain creators or topics are your kryptonite, BlockTube makes them disappear everywhere they'd otherwise show up: search, recommendations, the sidebar, comments.

Pros: free; uniquely good at targeted, rule-based blocking; regex support means you can write precise filters (block every video with "reaction" in the title, mute a whole channel and everything it appears in); great as a complement to a feed-blocker. Cons: it's less feature-rich than Unhook for general distraction control — built around the blocklist model, not around toggling YouTube's native surfaces, so it's not the tool for simply cleaning up the homepage. The regex approach has a small learning curve, and there's no Pomodoro, time tracker, or commitment lock.

Who it's for: people whose distraction problem is specific — a handful of channels or topics that reliably suck them in — rather than the YouTube interface in general. It's also excellent paired with one of the feed-blockers above: use Unhook or CleanFeed to clean the layout, and BlockTube to nuke the specific creators you can't stop clicking. Store note: available on Chrome and Firefox; free. Spend ten minutes building your blocklist and it pays off for months. If you want broad UI control rather than precise targeting, it isn't your main tool.

Best if you want to limit time, not features. StayFocusd is the odd one out, and it earns its place by doing something none of the others do: it caps how much time you can spend, on any website, full stop. It's not YouTube-specific — it's a time-budget blocker. You allot yourself, say, 20 minutes of YouTube per day, and once that budget is spent, the site simply won't load for the rest of the day. There's also a "nuclear option" that locks you out of chosen sites entirely for a set period.

Pros: free; the time-budget model attacks the real problem — total time lost — not individual UI elements; works across any distracting site, so it doubles as a general-purpose focus tool for Reddit, Twitter, news, and the rest; the nuclear option is genuinely hard to circumvent. Cons: it has no granular YouTube controls — it can't hide just the homepage or just Shorts while leaving subscriptions usable. It's all-or-nothing by time, so if you need YouTube for work or study, a hard daily cap can get in your way.

Who it's for: people whose issue isn't what they watch but how long they watch, and who want one tool to govern every time-sink site. Store note: search "StayFocusd" on the Chrome Web Store; free. Pair it with a feed-blocker for the best of both worlds — element removal from Unhook or CleanFeed, plus a hard time ceiling. On its own it limits time but won't clean up the experience.