A Rambox review focused on what the free plan actually allows

Most reviews of this category of software answer the wrong question. They compare feature grids across four products, when the reader is usually trying to settle something much narrower: whether the free tier covers the situation, and if not, what exactly the money buys. For Rambox, that answer is unusually clean, because the free and paid line is not drawn where most people assume.

The short version: the number of apps is not limited on the free plan. What is limited is the ability to stay signed into two accounts of the same service at once. If that is not needed, the paid tier is difficult to justify. If it is needed, the paid tier is not an upgrade, it is the product.

What the free plan actually includes

The pricing page lists Basic as free forever, with the following contents.

• Unlimited apps
• Up to 2 instances per app
• Notifications
• Focus mode
• Hibernation
• 1 active session

Unlimited apps on a free tier is unusual in this category. Wavebox's free Basic plan allows 2 groups with 2 apps per group. Shift's free plan allows 5 spaces with 10 apps per space. Counted purely on how many services can be pinned, the free Rambox tier is the most generous of the three.

Hibernation being included for free matters more than it sounds. Each service in a sidebar is a live web page running on a browser engine, so 20 pinned services consume roughly what 20 tabs would. Hibernation unloads the ones that have not been touched recently, and it is the only real lever on memory use in this category. Because it sits on the free tier, upgrading in the hope of a lighter machine tends to disappoint.

Focus mode and notifications also sit on the free side, which covers most of what people describe when they say they want to stop being interrupted. So the free tier handles quantity and it handles noise.

What it does not handle is separation. Workspaces, meaning the ability to switch a whole set of apps per project, are on the paid side. So is multi login. The free plan lets a large number of services be lined up. It does not let them be divided.

Where the paid line sits

Pro is $7.00 per month, or $70.00 per year, and the pricing page notes that annual billing saves two months. It includes everything in Basic plus:

• Workspaces
• Session and multi login
• Unlimited instances per app
• Unlimited custom apps
• Extensions
• 3 active sessions
• Spell checker
• Proxy per app
• JavaScript and CSS injection
• Custom user agent
• Mobile view

Read as a list, eleven items look like a lot of value for $70. Read against an actual working day, one line is usually carrying the whole cost. For most people it is session and multi login, because the situation that drove the search was three Gmail accounts or two Slack workspaces belonging to different clients.

Several of the other items are genuinely narrow. Proxy per app matters when one specific service has to connect from a fixed address. JavaScript and CSS injection matters when an internal tool's interface needs correcting locally. Mobile view exists mainly to open services that refuse desktop connections. Each of those is irreplaceable for the person who needs it and permanently unused by everyone else, which is why counting features is a poor way to compare plans here.

There is also a Teams plan at $14 per user per month, starting at 5 users, adding team management, centralized billing, SAML and Active Directory, preinstalled apps and custom branding. That tier is aimed at whoever hands out the machines, not at the person using one.

Who it is built for

The product is distributed for macOS, Windows and Linux, which puts it in a smaller group than it first appears. Several competitors in this space are effectively macOS first, and anyone running a mixed set of machines across a team ends up ruling those out before comparing anything else.

The marketing on the home page leans organizational rather than personal, claiming 80,000 or more users across 5,000 companies, and listing large firms among them. The Teams tier reinforces that reading, since SAML, Active Directory, preinstalled apps and custom branding are only meaningful when someone else is handing out the machines. The positioning line on the site states the intent plainly: browsers are for browsing, and this is for working.

That matters for an individual reader in one specific way. When a product is sold into organizations, the free tier tends to function as a trial surface for the paid one, and the features held back are the ones an administrator would want. Workspaces and session separation fit that pattern exactly. It is not a criticism of the pricing, but it does explain why the free tier is generous about quantity and strict about division.

The trial makes the first month unrepresentative

The pricing page states a 30 day Pro trial with no credit card required. That is generous, and it also creates a specific trap.

For the first 30 days, everything is available. Workspaces get set up, two accounts of the same service get signed in, extensions get installed. By the time the arrangement feels settled, the trial ends and the application starts behaving differently. The limits do not appear at the beginning, when the decision would be easy. They appear at the end, once the setup has become habit.

The way through this is to treat the trial as a measurement period rather than a free month. Keep a tally of how often the paid side actually gets used: how many times a second account of the same service was open at once, and how many times a workspace switch happened. Two numbers, written down. At day 30, those two numbers decide the question, and they decide it better than any feature comparison.

Wavebox runs a shorter 7 day trial, also without a credit card, plus a 30 day money back guarantee. Shift's free plan is a permanent tier rather than a trial. The structure of the first month differs across these products more than the prices do.

Instances are not sessions

The single most expensive misreading in this category is treating the free plan's "2 instances per app" as permission to run two accounts.

An instance is a second view of the same signed in state. Useful for keeping an inbox and a calendar visible simultaneously. It does not separate accounts, because the service still sees one signed in user.

A session is the boundary around cookies and local storage. Two boundaries means the service sees two different people, and that is the only mechanism that keeps two accounts of the same tool open without a logout in between. Rambox places this on the paid tier, and the free tier explicitly lists 1 active session against Pro's 3.

Browser profiles give away that same boundary at no cost. Google's documentation states it directly.

With profiles, you can keep all your Chrome info separate, like bookmarks, history, passwords, and other settings. Source: support.google.com

Safari has the same concept. So anyone whose only problem is two accounts on one service has a correct answer that costs nothing. What profiles cannot do is group things: each profile is a separate window, and macOS treats them all as one application when switching. Handling that grouping inside the tool is what Workspaces describes.

How it sits against the alternatives

Figures below come from each vendor's own pricing page, checked on 18 September 2026.

Option	Cost	Two accounts on one service	Grouping	Account required
Rambox Basic	Free	No, 2 instances per app only	None	Yes
Rambox Pro	$7 per month or $70 per year	Yes	Workspaces	Yes
Wavebox Basic	Free	One per group	2 groups, 2 apps each	Yes
Wavebox Pro	$8.33 per month, billed annually	Yes	Unlimited	Yes
Shift Free	Free	Within 5 spaces	5 spaces, 10 apps each	Yes
Shift Advanced	$199.99 per year	Yes	Unlimited	Yes
Ferdium	Free, Apache 2.0	Yes	Workspaces	Optional
Chrome profiles	Free	Yes	Not applicable	Optional

Two differences matter more than the prices.

The first is registration. Rambox requires an account even on the free tier, which means the list of services in use is synced to the vendor. On a personal machine that is unremarkable. On a machine where the service list is effectively a client list, it is worth deciding deliberately. Ferdium is the only row here that works without registering, and it carries no paid tier at all, being released under the Apache 2.0 license as a hard fork of Franz. The two approaches are set out side by side in Compared with Rambox and Compared with Ferdium.

The second is the spread on the paid side. From $70 per year to $199.99 per year is close to a threefold gap, which no feature checklist justifies on its own. Picking on the one point of daily friction works better than comparing lists.

What does not change after installing it

Some burdens move when switching to this kind of app. Others do not, and knowing which is which prevents a second migration later.

macOS still sees one application

Pinning 20 services does remove 40 tabs, and the density improvement is real. Switching speed is not affected. Command+Tab lands on applications, not services, so moving from one client's Slack to that same client's Notion is still a matter of scanning a list.

Links still open in the default browser

A link arriving in a chat message opens in the default browser, landing on whichever account is signed in there. For anyone whose work arrives as links, that means copy, switch, paste, repeatedly. No plan in the table changes that route.

Notifications name the service, not the account

A notification carries the app name and nothing about which of two accounts it was for. People who paid specifically to separate accounts are the ones who notice this first.

Memory behaves the same across the category

Every product in this comparison renders each pinned service as its own live page on a browser engine, so the resource cost scales with how many services stay loaded rather than with which vendor is chosen. Moving from tabs to a sidebar changes the arrangement, not the workload. The only setting that moves the number meaningfully is hibernation, and since that appears on the free tiers of both Rambox and Ferdium, it is available without spending anything.

What to change first

Spend one week counting two things: how often a logout and log back in was needed, and how often finding the right app took more than a few seconds. A high first number means the problem is sessions, and browser profiles solve it for free. A high second number means the problem is grouping, which is the part worth paying for, and the reasoning behind that pricing is laid out for SpaceDeck.