Mark Chavez

There are three ways of storing sessions in your browser.

1. Local Storage
2. Session Storage
3. Cookies

In this article, I’ll try to explain their differences so next time we’re asked this question, we can reason better and choose the most useful of the options.

What is Local Storage?

Local Storage means using localStorage to store your key-value pair in the browser. When using this way of storing, you don’t lose the data even when:

• Closing and re-opening a browser tab.
• Closing and re-opening a browser.
• Restarting the computer.

The only way a data can be removed from the local storage is either using localStorage.removeItem to remove a specific key-value pair or clearing the browser memory.

Session Storage

This type of storing is a bit far from what localStorage is.

• The data survives a browser page refresh
• Re-opening a browser tab or re-opening a browser removes the data
• Restarting the computer removes the data

Because of this limitation, sessionStorage is used less compared to localStorage.

Cookies

Amongst the three options, I’d say cookies is the most efficient way of storing sessions. It has the same similarities with localStorage but the special thing about cookies is that it is automatically sent on every HTTP request — which only a web server can access. It allows us to store data better and most especially for complex cases like a multi-step registration form where each step goes to the web server.