Wavebox: how to decide what you need

Two Gmail accounts, three client Slacks, a Notion that never closes, and a chat assistant that has to stay signed in to the right seat. Somewhere in that pile, Wavebox comes up as a candidate. The usual next move is to open the feature list and start reading, which is also the move that wastes the most time. A feature list cannot tell anyone whether a tool fits, because it does not know which of three very different problems the reader is carrying.

This is a decision guide rather than a review. It sets out what Wavebox publishes about limits, price, and platform, then gives a test that sorts readers into the group this kind of tool helps and the group it does not.

Three problems that get the same name

People describe all of the following as browser clutter, and the three have almost nothing in common.

The first is being signed in to two accounts of the same service at once. A work Google Workspace address and a personal Gmail. Client A's Slack and Client B's Slack. This is a cookie storage problem. No amount of tab arrangement touches it, which is why the readers who have this problem stay frustrated after trying every tab manager on the market.

The second is seeing too much. While working on Client A, the presence of Client B's inbox on screen pulls attention away. Nothing is technically broken. The need is for a smaller field of view, not for a second identity.

The third is the cost of getting back to a screen. With forty tabs open, the act of finding the right one is the friction. This is a switching problem, and part of it lives outside the browser entirely, in how macOS moves between applications.

Wavebox is built primarily for the first problem, and the second and third come along as consequences. Anyone whose real problem is the third one alone should know that before paying, because a browser cannot change what Command Tab does.

What is published, in numbers

Everything below can be checked on the Wavebox site rather than taken on trust.

The macOS build requires macOS 12 Monterey or later, and the download page states that it is optimized for both Apple Silicon and Intel machines. Windows and Linux builds come from the same page.

Pricing has three tiers. Basic is free. Pro is listed at $8.33 per month paid annually, which lands at roughly $100 for a year. Teams is listed at $12.50 per month per user. Those are the only two figures printed on the pricing page, so a monthly-billed rate for Pro is not something a reader can quote from the published page.

The trial is 7 days of Pro with no credit card required to start. When it ends, the account moves to the free Basic plan rather than being charged. There is a 30 day money back guarantee, and a 70 percent discount for education and for non-profits, claimed by starting a trial with an education or .org address and then emailing support.

The site footer lists the operator as Wavebox (Bookry Ltd), with an address in Bangor, United Kingdom. On the published pages there is no notice of the product shutting down, no notice of new signups being closed, and no announcement of a change of operator. The prices above are the ones on the page at the time of writing, and price is the item on this list most likely to move, so it is worth re-checking rather than quoting from an article.

Item	Basic	Pro	Teams
Price	Free	$8.33 per month, paid annually	$12.50 per month, per user
Groups	2	Unlimited	Unlimited
Apps per group	2	Unlimited	Unlimited
Extensions	1	All	All
Dashboards	1	Unlimited	Shared dashboards added
Cloud sync	Not listed	Yes	Yes

The seven levels, and why the level matters

Wavebox describes its structure as seven nested levels: Space, then Group, then App, then Saved Items, then tab group, then pinned tab, then an open or sleeping tab. Read top to bottom, that is also an ordering from permanent to temporary. A Space is decided once. An open tab is gone by the afternoon.

The load-bearing detail is which level holds the login.

Every app and tab belongs to a Space, and the Space is what holds the sign-in. Source: hub.wavebox.io

Two Gmail accounts therefore require two Spaces. Not two Groups, not two windows, not two pinned tabs. A Group also carries an attached Space, so that anything opened while working inside that Group inherits the right identity without being asked each time.

This single fact does most of the sorting work. A reader who keeps getting signed out of one account when signing in to another has a Space-level problem, and adding Groups will change nothing. A reader whose accounts are already separate but whose screen is chaotic has a Group-level problem, and adding Spaces will just add administration. Getting the level wrong is the most common way to spend an afternoon configuring a tool and feel no different afterwards.

Spaces and Profiles solve different strengths of separation

A second distinction sits alongside the first. A Profile in Wavebox is a whole separate instance: its own settings, extensions, passwords, history, and Spaces, with nothing crossing between them. Spaces, by contrast, stay separate on logins while remaining connected for everything else, so search runs across all of them, unread counts collect in one view, and two Spaces can sit side by side in a split screen.

The choice is not about which is better. It is about whether the reader wants to move between the separated areas during a normal working day. Client work usually wants Spaces. Bookkeeping, or a clean environment for testing, usually wants a Profile. The approach to keeping each area independent while still reachable is covered in more depth under Workspaces.

The test that decides it

Rather than comparing feature counts, answer five questions and count the yes answers.

Does the same service need to be signed in under two or more identities at the same time? Does a notification need to say which account it belongs to, not just which app? Does the number of separate clients or contexts grow over time rather than staying fixed? Does the setup need to survive moving to a different machine? Does more than one person need the same arrangement?

One yes is a mild case, and the free tier is likely to cover it. Two or three yes answers put a reader past the Basic limits within a few months. Four or five moves the question from personal tooling to team tooling, which is what the Teams tier exists for, with its shared dashboards and consolidated billing.

What makes this test more useful than a feature comparison is that it predicts the date the free plan stops being enough. Someone who adds one client every quarter, and who needs one Space per client, knows almost exactly when the second Group limit will bite. That is a far better basis for a decision than a list of capabilities, most of which will never be used.

The part a browser cannot fix

One limit is worth naming before money changes hands, because it applies to every product in this category rather than to one of them.

macOS treats a browser as a single application. The fast application switcher lands on the browser, not on the account inside it. From there the sidebar has to be read, the right area picked, and the right tab found. Three steps where the reader wanted one. A browser can make those three steps quicker and better labelled, and it cannot remove them, because the boundary being crossed belongs to the operating system rather than to the browser.

This matters for the reader whose real complaint is the third problem from earlier, the cost of getting back to a screen. Splitting accounts will not shorten that path on its own. What shortens it is having the destination be something the operating system can address directly, which is a different design decision rather than a feature that can be switched on. Anyone whose main frustration is switching speed should test that specific motion during the trial, rather than judging on how the sidebar looks when it is freshly organised.

The related point is that unread badges and notifications sit on the same boundary. A badge that says which app has news is useful. A badge that says which account has news removes a switch that was only ever performed to find out whether the message mattered. When comparing candidates, that distinction is worth more than most of the feature list.

Comparing candidates without getting lost

Several products occupy this space, and each one counts its features differently, which makes side by side feature tables close to useless. A better method is to ask every candidate the same five questions in the same order.

How many identities of one service can be signed in at once, and is that capped by plan or effectively unlimited. Whether a notification carries an account identity or only an app name. Where the macOS application switcher lands, on the browser as a whole or on the specific app. Where the free tier stops, and whether a trial and a free tier are two separate things or the same thing. Whether a configuration can be moved to a new machine without being rebuilt by hand.

Filling in that grid from published pages, rather than from reviews, produces a ranking against the reader's own problem rather than against a generic idea of quality. The same grid applied to this category is written up in Compared with Wavebox, and the identical questions run against a different candidate in Compared with Rambox, which makes the two readable as one comparison rather than two opinions.

Where the free tier stops being the answer

The Basic plan allows 2 groups with 2 apps in each, one extension, and one dashboard. In everyday terms that is two signed-in mail accounts and a small number of pinned apps. It is a genuine free tier rather than a time-limited demo, and for a reader whose only split is work and personal, it may be the end of the story.

The ceiling arrives from three directions. A third client needs a third Group. A second extension, which for most people means an ad blocker plus a password manager, exceeds the single extension allowance. And cloud sync, the thing that makes a setup survive a new machine, is a paid-tier item.

Worth knowing before starting: items added during the trial are not lost when it ends. The pricing page states that apps and links added during the trial become available again on upgrading. That makes it reasonable to build a realistic configuration during the 7 days, observe where it exceeds the Basic limits, and decide from evidence instead of estimation. The plan boundaries are set out in Pricing.

What to change first

Before installing anything, write down which of the three problems is the real one. If it is signing in to multiple identities of the same service, the next step is counting how many identities, because that number decides free against paid. If it is something else, a different fix will be cheaper and faster, and the approach to separating work into independent windows is described in SpaceDeck.