Vivaldi workspaces alternatives: what you can drop

People go looking for an alternative to Vivaldi Workspaces for one of two reasons. Either they wanted two workspaces open side by side and found out that is not possible, or they assumed that separate workspaces meant separate logins and found out that it does not. Both are real limits, both are documented, and neither is a defect. They come from what a workspace was built to be.

Before picking a replacement, it is worth splitting the feature into the jobs it performs. There are four of them, three have a direct substitute inside Vivaldi itself, and the fourth was never part of the job description. Once that split is clear, the choice usually gets smaller rather than bigger.

The four jobs a workspace is doing

Vivaldi describes Workspaces as a way to group tabs and Tab Stacks into categories, where selecting a workspace shows only the tabs in that category inside the window. Translated into daily use, that description covers four separate jobs.

Grouping. Related tabs collect under one name with an icon, and the workspace menu shows how many tabs are in each one.

Hiding. Everything that belongs to another category leaves the tab bar while you work. This is the part most people actually value, and it is the part that tab grouping alone does not provide.

Returning. Workspaces are saved automatically when the browser closes, so a set of tabs survives a restart without being pinned or bookmarked.

Separating. Acting as a different account on the same service. This one is not a job Workspaces performs at all, and the confusion around it produces most of the disappointment.

Two workspaces in the same profile share one cookie store. The same Gmail account is signed in to both. Signing out of one signs out of the other. Nothing about naming a workspace changes that, because identity lives one level down, in the profile.

So the first question is which of the four you were relying on. If the answer is one of them, then three quarters of the feature is something you can drop without losing anything.

One workspace can only be open in one window

This is the limit that sends most people looking elsewhere, and the help documentation states it directly.

A workspace can be open in one browser window at a time. When switching to a workspace that is open in a different window, instead of opening the workspace in the current window, focus will be moved to the window where the chosen workspace is already open. Source: help.vivaldi.com

Put plainly, a layout with work tabs on the left display and reference tabs on the right display cannot be built out of two workspaces. Asking for the second one pulls focus to the window that already holds it rather than opening a copy.

The behavior is consistent with the design. A workspace is a view inside one window, not a container that can be instantiated twice. It is the same reason the switch feels instant: nothing is being loaded or moved, the window is simply showing a different subset of what it already holds.

The substitute for the side by side case is not another workspace feature. It is windows. Vivaldi opens as many windows as needed, and each window can hold its own set of tabs. What gets lost in that trade is the name, the icon, and the tab count in the menu. What also gets lost is position: window size and placement are not stored anywhere, so a restart means arranging the displays again by hand.

Grouping alone is covered by Tab Stacks

If grouping was the job you needed, Tab Stacks are closer than anything outside Vivaldi. A stack collects tabs into a two level group, works inside a workspace, and can be combined with Tab Tiling to view several tabs in split screen or a grid at once.

The difference is visibility. A stack stays on the same tab bar as everything else. Tabs are grouped but nothing is hidden, so a bar with forty tabs in six stacks is tidier without being quieter.

That distinction is the decision point. If the problem is finding a tab, stacks solve it. If the problem is seeing tabs that belong to other work, stacks do not. Answering that question honestly tends to settle whether a replacement is needed at all, because a stack costs nothing to try and nothing to undo.

Tab Tiling deserves a mention here for a different reason. It is the closest thing Vivaldi offers to the side by side case described above, within a single window. It does not give two workspaces at once, but for comparing two pages it removes the reason people wanted that in the first place.

Separating logins is a profile, not a workspace

If identity was the job, the answer inside Vivaldi is User Profiles. The documentation describes profiles as a way for several users to share one Vivaldi installation without separate operating system accounts or standalone installs, with each profile keeping its own extensions, bookmarks, Speed Dials, cookies, and history. Keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures are also per profile.

Profiles are created from the Profile button in the top right corner, through Manage People and Add Person. On macOS and Windows there is an option during that step to create a desktop shortcut for the profile. That option is worth taking. A per profile shortcut means launching directly into the right identity instead of opening the browser and then switching.

The cost is duplication. Every profile needs its own extensions installed, its own bookmarks, and its own notification permissions granted site by site. Splitting three accounts means maintaining three environments, and a notification that arrives still carries a site name without an account name attached. Profiles draw the boundary in the right place, but they draw it coarsely.

There is also a Guest Profile for the temporary case, and deleting a profile through Remove Person erases that profile and its data permanently. Neither is a substitute for daily account separation, but both are worth knowing before building a structure on top of profiles.

The same word means different things in other browsers

Looking outside Vivaldi means comparing features that share a name and not much else. Two of them changed recently enough that the change matters more than the feature comparison.

Microsoft Edge has Workspaces, and the shared browsing part of that feature, where several people could join the same set of tabs, has been retired. The data behind Workspaces moves from OneDrive to the Edge Sync service, and what remains is a personal feature that syncs across a single person's devices rather than across people.

Arc has Spaces, which are the closest match to what Vivaldi Workspaces do. In May 2025 The Browser Company said publicly that active development on Arc had stopped and that the app would receive Chromium and security updates rather than new features. Atlassian completed its acquisition of The Browser Company on October 21, 2025 for 610 million dollars. Arc still runs, and Spaces still work.

Chrome and Safari take the other route. Both have profiles rather than workspaces, which means they separate identity rather than grouping tabs. Safari Tab Groups sit closer to Tab Stacks than to Workspaces. Comparing any of these against Workspaces directly leads nowhere, because they are answering the other half of the question.

None of this is a reason to pick or avoid any of them. It is a reason to check the status of a feature before building a workflow on it, since migrating a working setup costs more than the feature is usually worth.

What you can drop, and what you cannot

The honest accounting of a move away from Vivaldi runs in both directions. Workspaces is one feature inside a browser that also ships mail, a calendar, a feed reader, ad and tracker blocking, a Proton VPN integration, tab hibernation, side panels, notes, and translation. Leaving for a workspace replacement means leaving all of that too.

That sounds like an argument for staying, and often it is. It is only an argument for staying if those features are in use. Counting them is a ten minute exercise and it usually produces a shorter list than expected. Someone who reads mail in a dedicated client and blocks ads at the network level is carrying most of that weight without using it.

What cannot be dropped is whichever of the four jobs you actually depend on. Grouping and returning are cheap to replace and available almost everywhere. Hiding is available in fewer places than people assume. Separating identity per window, so that two accounts on the same service can be visible at the same time, is the rarest of the four, and it is the one that no amount of tab organization will produce.

That last combination is worth naming precisely, because it is where the search usually ends up: a different account and a separate window, at the same time, without a restart. A view switcher inside one window cannot reach it by design. The approach that does reach it treats the window as the unit rather than the tab, which is what the Workspaces page lays out, and the surrounding behavior around notifications and always on apps is described under Features.

Three things to verify before switching tools

A feature list will not tell you whether a replacement actually solves the case you care about. Three checks will, and all three take a single day of ordinary use with a trial version.

First, whether two windows can hold two accounts of the same service at the same time. Plenty of tools describe themselves as supporting multiple accounts and mean sequential switching rather than simultaneous display. Open the same service twice, sign in with different accounts, and see whether both stay signed in.

Second, whether a notification says which account it came from. A badge that reads only with the service name still forces a switch just to find out whether the message was worth reading. That single missing detail is responsible for a surprising share of daily interruptions, and it is invisible until real messages start arriving.

Third, whether window position and size survive a restart. This one is almost never documented, and it is the one people discover a week in, after arranging two displays by hand every morning.

The migration cost belongs in the same calculation. Moving away from a setup with five built out workspaces means rearranging tabs and signing in again across every service, which realistically costs a few hours. Whether that is worth paying depends entirely on switching volume. Someone crossing the boundary twenty times a day recovers it quickly. Someone crossing it three times a day probably does not, and is better served by trimming the workspace list than by changing tools.

Trial periods exist for exactly this. Running the real workload through a candidate for one day answers all three questions and costs less than reading a comparison table.

What to change first

Spend ten minutes deciding which of the four jobs you were relying on, then test the cheapest substitute for that one job before changing tools. If the answer turns out to be two identities visible at the same moment, no view switcher will get there, and the unit of separation has to move from the tab to the window, which is what SpaceDeck is built around.