Looking for a Brave alternative that keeps your accounts apart

The Brave alternatives that make sense on a Mac depend on why Brave is being left. To keep strong privacy defaults without Chromium, the candidates are Firefox, LibreWolf, Safari and Orion. To get a different way of organising tabs, Vivaldi and Zen are the usual picks. To stay on Chromium with less built in, Chrome or Edge. And if the real complaint is juggling several accounts of the same service, it is worth knowing that Brave itself now lists Containers among its features, so leaving may not be necessary at all. Every product fact below was checked on its official page on 18 October 2026. This site is run by the developer of SpaceDeck, an app aggregation browser for macOS.

Name the reason before choosing a replacement

Forum threads about leaving Brave tend to mix four different complaints. They point to different answers.

The extras. Brave ships Rewards, its own ads program paid in Basic Attention Tokens, a crypto wallet, a paid VPN and an AI assistant. Brave's Rewards page says Rewards is switched on from the BAT icon in the address bar, and that Brave Ads only appear for people who choose them. Some people are fine with features that stay off. Others want a browser where those features do not exist.

The engine. Brave is built on Chromium, the same open source core that, according to Brave's own comparison with Chrome, also powers Edge, Opera and Vivaldi. Anyone who wants a web less dependent on one engine has to look at Firefox based or WebKit based browsers.

The interface. Some people simply want a different way of working: vertical tabs, workspaces, split views, a calmer look. This is a design preference, not a privacy one.

The accounts. Three Gmail accounts, two Slack workspaces, a client's Google Drive. The switching friction stays the same whichever logo is on the Dock. This reason is the one most often misdiagnosed as a browser problem, and it gets its own section below.

Being honest about which of the four applies saves a migration that changes nothing.

Alternatives that keep strong privacy defaults

These are for someone who chose Brave for blocking and wants to keep that without Brave.

Safari

Already installed, and signed in to the same Apple account as the iPhone. Apple's Safari guide describes Prevent cross-site tracking under Safari > Settings > Privacy, blocking of tracking by social media buttons embedded in other sites, and a simplified system configuration presented to websites so that a Mac looks more like other Macs, which reduces fingerprinting. Safari does not include a general ad blocker. Content blockers come from the App Store, and the catalogue is smaller than the Chrome Web Store.

Firefox

The main browser on a different engine. Mozilla's Mac page lists vertical tabs, tab groups, sidebar access and PDF editing, and its privacy features page describes Enhanced Tracking Protection, which blocks trackers that follow people from site to site. As with Safari, a full ad blocker is an add-on rather than a default.

LibreWolf

A custom version of Firefox focused on privacy. The LibreWolf site says it removes telemetry, includes uBlock Origin out of the box, uses privacy-conscious search providers by default, and is built from the latest Firefox stable source. For someone who liked that Brave blocked things without any setup, this is the closest match on the Firefox side.

Orion

A browser from Kagi built on WebKit, the engine Safari uses. The Orion page describes built-in ad blocking and anti-tracking, zero telemetry, and support for Safari, Chrome and Firefox extensions, with 20 curated extensions marked as guaranteed to work. That combination appeals to people who want Safari's engine with a wider extension choice.

Alternatives that change how tabs are organised

Vivaldi

Also Chromium, so extensions and imported data carry over the way they did into Brave. The Vivaldi desktop page lists a built-in tracker and ad blocker, Tab Tiling for side by side pages, two-level Tab Stacks, Web Panels, a built-in mail client and calendar. Its Workspaces help page explains grouping tabs for topics such as work, research or shopping in the same window, created either empty or from tabs already open. For someone who left Brave wanting more control over layout, Vivaldi changes the most while keeping Chromium compatibility.

Zen

A Firefox based browser with a design-first approach. The Zen site lists Workspaces, Compact Mode that hides the tab bar until needed, Glance for quick access to frequently used tabs, and Split View for two tabs side by side. It is free and open source.

Chrome and Edge

The lowest-effort move, since both use Chromium. The trade is that ad and tracker blocking becomes an extension decision again. Edge adds its own workspaces feature for grouping tabs by project.

The options side by side

Browser	Engine	Blocking without add-ons	Organising features	Fits the reason
Safari	WebKit	Cross-site tracking prevention	Tab groups, profiles, web apps	Native Mac, Apple ecosystem
Firefox	Gecko	Enhanced Tracking Protection	Vertical tabs, tab groups	A different engine
LibreWolf	Gecko	uBlock Origin included	Firefox's own	Brave-like defaults, no extras
Orion	WebKit	Ad and tracker blocking	Extensions from three stores	WebKit plus extensions
Vivaldi	Chromium	Tracker and ad blocker	Workspaces, tiling, stacks, mail	More layout control
Zen	Gecko	Not stated on its home page	Workspaces, split view, compact mode	A calmer interface
Chrome	Chromium	None by default	Profiles, tab groups	Cheapest migration

The engine column is the one most often overlooked. Moving from Brave to Vivaldi or Chrome keeps the same rendering core, so a site that breaks in Brave for engine reasons will usually break the same way. Moving to Safari, Orion, Firefox, LibreWolf or Zen changes the core, which fixes some sites and occasionally breaks others that were only tested on Chromium.

What is lost when Brave is removed

A replacement chosen in frustration tends to undercount what was working. Three things are worth listing before uninstalling.

Some of the blocking. Brave's Shields page describes what runs by default on every site: third-party ad and tracker blocking using filter lists from the EasyList and EasyPrivacy projects, the uBlock Origin project and Brave's own lists, cookie partitioning, CNAME uncloaking that catches trackers disguised as first-party code, and fingerprint randomization that makes the browser look different to each site every time it restarts. List-based blocking transfers to any browser with a good content blocker. LibreWolf ships one. Fingerprint randomization is the hardest part to replace, because it has to happen inside the engine. Safari's simplified system configuration takes a different approach to the same problem, making Macs look alike rather than making each visit look different.

The bundled subscriptions, if they were in use. Brave's VPN page lists Brave Firewall + VPN at $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year, with a 7-day free trial, protecting the whole device rather than only the browser. Its VPN page says one subscription covers up to 10 devices, while the FAQ on Brave's home page says up to 5, so anyone counting on a specific number should confirm it in the account portal. Brave sells and sets up the VPN from inside the browser, so removing Brave means either keeping it installed for the VPN or moving to a separate VPN service.

A browser that needed no configuration. Moving to Chrome means choosing and maintaining a blocker. Moving to Firefox or Safari means accepting their defaults and finding out which sites behave differently. None of this is hard, but it is work that was already done.

When the real reason is accounts

Look at a typical Tuesday. If the irritations are slow, ad-heavy pages, the lists above are the answer. If they are about signing out of one Gmail to reach another, or about which window holds the client's Slack, no change of brand will help, because the problem lives in how browsers separate identities.

Most browsers separate identities with profiles. Google's Chrome profiles page describes keeping bookmarks, history, passwords and other settings separate per profile. Each profile is its own window with its own extension list, so five identities mean five windows to find.

Brave has started moving past that model. Its comparison page lists Containers among the features Brave has and Chrome lacks. On Brave's public GitHub tracker, the first round of the work, issue Containers, was closed on 1 June 2026 under the 1.92.x release milestone. A follow-up issue, Containers part 2, was still open in October 2026, and its checklist includes always opening a given website in a container and binding a tab group to a container. Another open item asks to let installed web apps launch inside a specific container. In other words, containers exist in Brave, and the pieces that would make them effortless for daily work are still being built.

For anyone whose only reason for leaving was account juggling, the first step is to update Brave and look for containers before installing anything else.

There are two other routes on a Mac. Safari can turn any page into a separate web app with File > Add to Dock, and Apple states that each web app keeps its own cookies and website data, so a second account of one service can live in a second web app. And there is a category of browser built around web apps rather than tabs, where each service has a fixed place in a sidebar and its own storage, and several accounts of one service stay signed in side by side in one window. How that grouping works is set out on Workspaces, and the service catalogue such a browser covers is on Supported apps.

Moving out of Brave without losing anything

Migrations fail in predictable places.

Passwords first. Import bookmarks, history and passwords into the new browser, then sign in to a few important sites to confirm the passwords actually arrived. Only then remove Brave. If Brave Sync was on, turn it off on each device so no stale copy is left behind.

Change the default browser at the same time. In System Settings > Desktop & Dock, set Default web browser. If Brave stays the default, links from Mail, Slack and calendar invites keep opening there, and within a week half of the day lives in each browser.

Bring three extensions, not thirty. Start with the ones used daily. Check that each exists in the destination's store before committing, since Safari and Firefox catalogues differ from Chrome's. Add the rest only when something is genuinely missing, so a broken page has one suspect instead of thirty.

Expect a short list of broken sites. Blocking-heavy browsers break the occasional checkout, sign-in redirect or embedded video. Note which sites needed an exception. The list is usually short and stops growing within two weeks.

What to change first

Write down which of the four reasons applies, then pick from the matching list and change the default browser the same day. If the reason is accounts, check Brave's containers first, and if the setup still needs a window per identity, try an app aggregation browser such as SpaceDeck: it imports bookmarks from Brave without modifying it, its free plan covers one workspace with up to three apps, and its 14-day trial needs no account or card.