Vivaldi workspaces: what the free tier covers

Looking for the price of Vivaldi workspaces turns up something unusual: no pricing page, no plan comparison, no seat count. That absence is easy to misread as a missing page or a free trial that will end. It is neither. The browser has no paid tier, workspaces are not gated behind one, and there is no upgrade that raises a limit, because no limit was set.

That leaves a more useful question than how much. If nothing is charged for, what is the thing being paid with, and what does a paid product in the same category actually sell? Both have clear answers, and together they explain when free is the right answer and when it stops being one.

Nothing to buy, nothing to expire

The desktop browser is downloaded and used at no cost on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Creating workspaces, naming them, giving them icons, setting rules that sort tabs into them, and hibernating the ones not in use are all part of the standard build. There is no counter on how many workspaces can exist, no cap on tabs inside one, and no trial clock running in the background.

The same is true of the features that sit next to workspaces. Tab Stacks, Tab Tiling, Web Panels, Quick Commands, Command Chains, the built in mail client, the calendar, the feed reader, the tracker and ad blocker, and end to end encrypted Sync are all present in the same free download. A reader who only wanted to know whether the good parts are behind a paywall can stop here: they are not.

This shape is different from most of the category. Tools built specifically to hold several web apps in one place usually offer a free tier that works and a paid tier that removes a ceiling, which means the free version answers the question of whether the approach fits and the paid version is where the approach is actually lived in.

Where the money comes from instead

A browser that charges nothing still has salaries to pay, and Vivaldi publishes how that works rather than leaving it to guesswork.

Browsers have different sources of income. Some use your data in ad networks, push promoted content or use other invasive methods to fund their development. Source: vivaldi.com

Four streams are named on that page. Partner deals with search engines produce revenue when searches run through the preinstalled options, listed as DuckDuckGo, Ecosia, Qwant, Startpage, Yahoo, and Yandex, with Google explicitly included as the exception that pays nothing. Partner deals with bookmark partners share revenue from the Speed Dial entries that ship on a new install, such as Booking.com and eBay. Direct Match, introduced on desktop in Vivaldi 6.4, earns a small amount when a suggested brand link is used. And since March 2025, a partnership with Proton puts a VPN inside the browser, with complimentary access to the basic package and a share of the fee when someone upgrades to a paid Proton plan. Donations, monthly or one off, are named as a fourth source that the company describes as not yet significant.

None of these depend on knowing what a given person does inside a workspace, which is the relevant point for anyone weighing free against paid. The funding model attaches to defaults and partnerships rather than to usage data, so there is no mechanism by which building twelve workspaces produces a bill later.

What the same job costs elsewhere

Readers comparing a free browser with a paid app aggregator are usually comparing different shapes of the same problem. The prices below are the published figures for the main paid alternatives, taken from each vendor's own pricing page.

Tool	Free tier	Paid tier
Vivaldi	Everything, no paid tier exists	None
Wavebox	Free plan after a 7 day Pro trial	Pro at 8.33 USD per month paid annually, Teams at 12.50 USD per user per month
Shift	Free forever, 5 Spaces and 10 apps per Space	Advanced at 199.99 USD annually
Rambox	Free plan after a 30 day Pro trial	Pro at 84 USD per year
Ferdium	Free and open source, community built	None

Two things stand out in that table. The first is spread: the paid options run from 84 USD a year to 199.99 USD a year for a single person, which is a real difference in what a year of this decision costs. The second is that the free tiers are not equivalent to each other. Shift publishes its free limits as numbers, 5 Spaces and 10 apps per Space, so a reader can tell in advance whether the free plan fits. Wavebox and Rambox both start everyone on a timed trial of the paid plan and drop to free afterwards, which means the first impression is of the paid product.

The trial terms are worth reading alongside the prices, because they decide how much a fair test costs. Wavebox states that every account starts with a 7 day free trial of Pro, that no credit card is required to start it, and that there is a 30 day money back guarantee afterwards. Rambox opens with a 30 day Pro trial, also without a card. Shift takes the opposite route and publishes its free tier as permanent with stated limits rather than as a countdown.

Seven days is short for this particular decision. A tab and account arrangement is not judged on the day it is built. It is judged in the second week, when a rule misfires, a notification arrives from the wrong account, or a machine restarts and something does not come back the way it was. Anyone testing on a trial clock should front load the awkward cases rather than the pleasant ones: sign in with the second account, open the thing that usually breaks, and restart the computer once before the clock runs out.

A side by side of features rather than prices is a better basis for a decision than either table, and the pages on Compared with Wavebox and Compared with Shift set out where each of those tools draws its boundaries around accounts and windows.

What a free browser asks in return

Free is not the same as free of influence, and the honest version of this comparison names what the defaults are doing. The preinstalled search engines earn revenue when they are used. The Speed Dial tiles on a fresh install include commercial partners. Direct Match surfaces brand links among search suggestions and earns on a click.

All three are adjustable. Vivaldi states plainly that preinstalled bookmarks can be replaced with a reader's own, and that Direct Match is optional like everything else in the browser. Someone who sets Google as the default search engine and clears the partner tiles has a browser that earns the company nothing and still works identically. That is a fair trade to understand before choosing, and it is a materially different trade from a subscription, where the payment is explicit and the defaults are not selling anything.

The limits that no payment removes

The important caveat about a free browser is not that something is withheld. It is that some things are structural, and paying would not change them.

Workspaces group tabs inside one window. They do not give each group its own cookies, so two workspaces in the same profile share one login for every service. Running two accounts on the same site means using user profiles, which do hold separate cookies, extensions, bookmarks, and history. That is available at no cost as well, with one cost of a different kind attached: syncing profile data across devices currently requires a separate Vivaldi account for each profile.

Sync itself is free and encrypted end to end, with the data held on servers in Iceland, and the published list of what it carries covers bookmarks, Speed Dials, some settings, passwords, autofill, history, extensions, Web Apps, Reading List, Open Tabs, and Notes. Workspaces are not on that list. A reader who wants the same arrangement on a laptop and a desktop rebuilds it by hand on the second machine, regardless of what they would be willing to pay.

The practical reading of that is simple. Free removes the question of whether the tool is worth its price, and it leaves every question about shape exactly where it was.

Support is the last difference and it is genuine. A paid plan at one of the vendors above includes a support channel with someone contractually on the other end, and the Teams and Advanced tiers are largely sold on that plus administration. A free browser points at a community forum. For an individual, that difference rarely matters. For a small team standardising on one tool, it sometimes does, and it is worth naming rather than glossing over. The questions that come up most often in that decision are collected on the FAQ page.

The cost that never appears on an invoice

Money is the easiest part of this comparison to measure and the least likely to decide it. The larger expense is the time spent switching, and it is paid in small pieces.

Consider what the setup actually costs. Building a workspace structure takes an hour of thought, and rebuilding it on a second machine takes that hour again because the layout does not travel. Every rule that sorts tabs automatically pays that back, and every rule that misfires charges a little of it again. A tool abandoned after three weeks costs the setup twice, once to build and once to leave, which is why a free trial that ends before the habit forms is worth less than it looks.

Then there is the daily tax. One browser window holding twelve services means one application switcher target, notifications that say the name of a site rather than the name of an account, and a single crash that takes all twelve down together. None of that is a fault in workspaces. It follows from putting everything in one window, which is the arrangement a tab based tool is designed around. A tool that keeps each web app in its own window pays more memory and gains independence, and a reader whose real complaint is about interruptions rather than tidiness is better served by the second arrangement, whatever either one costs. The trade offs and the current figures sit on the Pricing page.

What to change first

If the question was whether workspaces are free, the answer is yes, with no tier above them and nothing expiring. Spend the first hour on Workspace Rules rather than on comparing plans, since rules are what make the arrangement hold. If the friction that brought up the price question is really about accounts, notifications, or one window carrying everything, price is the wrong axis, and a browser that gives each web app its own window is the shape to evaluate, which is what SpaceDeck is.