Separating work and personal browsing: what the free tier covers

Searching for the price of separating work and personal browsing turns up subscription pages for products that were never necessary for the basic version of the task. Every mainstream browser on macOS can already hold two identities apart at no cost, and for a large share of people that is the end of the matter. The reason the question keeps getting asked is that the free routes all stop at the same narrow set of limits, and the products being advertised exist precisely to sell past those limits. Knowing which limit has actually been reached is what turns a pricing page into a decision.

The free routes and where each one stops

Five arrangements cost nothing. They are not equivalent, and each fails at a different point.

Route	Cost	Where it stops
Two browser applications side by side	Free	Two sets of updates and settings to maintain, and only one can hold the default browser role
Profiles inside one browser	Free	One cookie store per profile, and macOS sees one application, so notification filtering cannot distinguish the sides
Firefox Multi-Account Containers	Free	Containers separate cookies per tab but share history, bookmarks, and extensions
Safari profiles	Free, macOS Sonoma and later	Confined to Safari, and extensions are enabled per profile rather than isolated per identity
A second macOS user account	Free	The strictest boundary available, at the cost of logging out to cross it

The first two rows carry almost all real world use. A second browser application gives the operating system something to distinguish, which matters for the application switcher and for Focus modes. Profiles keep one application and one set of preferences, which is lighter to maintain but invisible to macOS.

None of these rows is a limited edition of a paid product. Profiles are a full feature with no upgrade path attached, and Google's documentation describes them without any commercial qualifier:

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

There is no profile count limit published, no premium tier that unlocks more separation, and no charge for syncing that separation to another Mac through a personal Google Account. For anyone whose problem is mixed bookmarks, mixed history, and mixed logins, the spend is zero and the search can end here.

The free routes all stop at the same place

The limit that sends people to pricing pages is specific enough to name. A profile holds one cookie store, and a cookie store holds one session per site. Two accounts on the same service inside one profile evict each other.

This matters because modern work rarely splits neatly by service. The same mail provider appears on both sides. The same chat tool holds a company workspace and a client workspace. The same cloud suite holds a personal drive and a work drive. Splitting by profile turns each of those into a window switch, and splitting by application turns them into a second application to install and update.

The free workarounds exist and each has a cost that is paid in attention rather than money. A private window holds a second session but discards it on close, so it suits a quick check and not a day's work. A second profile per extra account multiplies the number of windows in play. Firefox containers solve exactly this case for cookies, and give up per identity extensions in exchange.

What the paid products in this category sell, almost without exception, is the removal of this one limit. They give each app window its own session, so two accounts of one service stay signed in side by side with no switching. Everything else on their feature lists tends to be secondary to that.

The free routes are not free of upkeep

Nothing is billed, but the two browser application route in particular carries recurring work, and it is worth pricing before choosing it over profiles.

Extensions have to be solved twice. Each browser has its own store and its own inventory. A Safari extension comes through the App Store, and Chromium and Firefox each maintain separate catalogues, so an extension central to a workflow may not exist on the other side at all. Paid extensions add a second question, since some licences are tied to a browser or a seat rather than to a person.

Settings do not cross. Privacy controls, search engine choices, download locations, and site permissions are configured per browser, and a decision made on one side has to be repeated on the other. Bookmarks sync inside each browser's own account, so moving one between the two sides is a manual export and import rather than a drag.

Updates arrive on two schedules. Two applications means two release cycles, two sets of release notes when something changes, and two places where an extension can break after an update.

Only one can hold the default browser role. Whichever application does not hold it will only ever receive links by deliberate action, which is the intended behaviour for a personal side and a daily friction for whichever side receives more links than expected.

Anything left running is running twice. A chat client and a mail client kept open on both sides are four long lived connections rather than two, and each browser keeps its own set of processes.

None of this makes the route wrong. It makes the choice between two applications and two profiles a real trade rather than an obvious one, and it explains why some people who tried the two application route end up looking at products that put both sides in a single window.

What the paid products charge for

Published prices as listed on the vendors' own pricing pages, checked in September 2026:

Product	Free tier	Paid
Rambox	Basic, free forever: unlimited apps, up to 2 instances per app, notifications, focus mode, hibernation	Pro at 7.00 US dollars per month or 70.00 per year. Teams at 14 US dollars per user per month, starting at 5 users
Wavebox	Free download available	Pro listed at 8.33 US dollars per month paid annually. Business at 12.50 US dollars per month per user
Shift	Free, 0 dollars forever: 5 Spaces, 10 apps per Space	Advanced at 199.99 US dollars billed annually
Ferdium	Open source, built by the community, usable without an account	No paid tier

The spread between the cheapest paid tier and the most expensive is more than twice, and the products are not sold on the same axis. Reading these as one price ladder produces the wrong choice.

Two other line items are frequently mistaken for the cost of splitting browsers and are not. A Google Workspace seat pays for mail, storage, and administration, and does not change what browser profiles can do. A password manager family or business plan pays for vault sharing, which is a separate problem that happens to surface during the same task.

Free forever tiers are not the same shape

The word free appears on all four rows above and means something different on each, which is the part worth reading carefully before installing anything.

Rambox limits instances rather than apps. The free Basic tier allows unlimited apps but up to 2 instances of each, which means two accounts of the same service are within the free tier and a third is not. New accounts start on a 30 day Pro trial and continue on the free plan afterwards if Pro is not kept.

Shift limits the container structure instead. The free tier allows 5 Spaces with 10 apps per Space, which is generous in total count and rigid in arrangement. Whether that fits depends on how many distinct contexts are in play rather than how many accounts.

Ferdium has no upper tier to reach. It is open source and community built, it can be used without creating an account, and it includes workspaces and service hibernation. The trade is that support comes from a community rather than a vendor, and the product roadmap belongs to contributors.

The practical instruction is to identify the axis before the amount. A limit on instances per app, a limit on apps per space, and a limit on which features are unlocked are three different constraints, and the one that binds is decided by the actual account list rather than by the headline number. Comparisons along those lines are set out on Compared with Rambox and Compared with Ferdium.

The cost of leaving is worth checking before joining

A subscription in this category holds the daily arrangement of a working day, which makes the exit terms more consequential than the monthly figure.

Three questions cover it. What happens to the separated sessions when a paid plan lapses, since a tool that drops back to a free tier with a lower instance limit will have to evict something. Whether the list of configured apps and workspaces can be exported, because rebuilding twenty app configurations by hand is a real afternoon. Whether the free tier remains usable after a trial ends, which Rambox states directly by continuing new accounts on the free Basic plan once the 30 day Pro trial finishes.

The same questions apply to the free routes, where the answers are mostly reassuring. Browser profiles signed into an account can be recreated on another machine by signing in again. Profiles never signed in hold their only copy locally, and removing one erases its bookmarks, history, and passwords from the computer.

One asymmetry is worth noting. Moving from a free route to a paid product is a setup task measured in an hour. Moving back is measured in the same hour plus the loss of whatever the paid product was doing that the free route cannot. That asymmetry is an argument for running the free route long enough to know exactly which limit is being hit, not an argument against paying.

Deciding without paying first

The sequence that avoids buying the wrong thing has three steps and no spending in the first two.

Start with profiles or two applications and run them for a week. Most of the reported pain resolves here, and the week produces the information the next step needs.

Then write down the exact limit that was hit. Useful answers are specific: two accounts of one chat tool cannot stay signed in at once, or notification filtering cannot tell the sides apart, or the number of windows in play has passed what can be tracked. Answers like it feels cluttered do not map onto any product feature and will not be fixed by a purchase.

Only then read pricing pages, and read the free tier of each rather than the paid one, since the free tier is where the shape of the limit shows. Every product listed above can be run at no cost for long enough to learn whether the constraint actually moves. Where those tiers differ and what each unlocks is set out on Pricing.

What to change first

Run the free route for a week before reading any pricing page, then name the one limit that stopped it. If that limit is two accounts of the same service staying signed in at once, the paid tier of every product in this category is aimed at it, and the free tiers differ enough that the comparison is worth making on SpaceDeck alongside the others.