How to Stay Logged Into Multiple Accounts on the Same Site (macOS)
Two Google accounts. A work Slack and a client's Slack. An admin account and the test user you need to check something as. Sooner or later a site wants you to be one person at a time, and you end up signing out and back in all day, or keeping a private window permanently open and losing it every time you quit.
There are five ways to handle this on macOS, and most people are best served by one of the free ones. It helps to understand why the problem exists at all, because that's what tells you which option actually solves it.
Why a second login kicks out the first
A website knows who you are from a cookie. When you sign in, the site stores a cookie against its own domain, and your browser sends it back on every subsequent request.
The important part is where that cookie lives. A browser keeps one cookie jar per profile, and within a jar there's one set of cookies per site. Sign into the same site a second time and the new session cookie lands in the same slot, overwriting the first. That isn't a bug or a restriction the site imposes on you. There's simply only one place to put it.
(Some sites build their own multi-account switcher on top of this, Google being the obvious one. That works because the site deliberately keeps several sessions in one cookie and lets you pick between them. It's a per-site feature, not something you can rely on generally.)
So every real solution does the same thing underneath: give the browser more than one jar. The options differ in how heavy that separation is and how much friction it adds.
The five options
1. Browser profiles
Free, built in, and right for most people. Chrome, Edge, Arc and Firefox all support multiple profiles. Each profile is a full separate jar: separate cookies, separate history, separate extensions, separate everything.
This is the correct default answer. It costs nothing, it's well supported, and the separation is complete. The friction is that a profile is a window — switching accounts means switching windows, and you accumulate one window per identity.
If your answer to "how many accounts, how often" is "two, a few times a day", stop here. You don't need anything else.
2. Firefox Multi-Account Containers
The most elegant version of this idea, and also free. Firefox has an official extension that gives each tab its own cookie jar, colour-coded, in a single window. You can have a Work tab and a Personal tab sitting next to each other, both logged into the same site, in the same window.
The only condition is that you have to be willing to use Firefox for these tasks.
3. Private windows
A private window is a temporary jar, which is both the point and the problem. Good for "I need to check one thing as another user right now". Bad as a daily arrangement: close it and you're signed out, and you can't have two private identities at once in the same browser.
4. Different browsers
Chrome for work, Safari for personal. Zero setup, and the separation is absolute. It falls apart past two identities, and you end up with one browser you know well and another you're fighting.
5. Separate macOS user accounts
Total isolation, and heavy. Fast User Switching gives you completely separate everything: browsers, apps, files, keychain. Genuinely useful when the boundary matters for real, like a shared machine or contractor work you want kept apart from your own. Far too heavy for "two Gmail tabs".
Where a web workspace fits
A sixth arrangement solves a different combination of problems rather than a heavier version of this one.
Some tools keep web apps in a panel you summon over whatever you're working in, and give each tab its own isolated session. Overlay works this way: tabs can be signed into different accounts on the same site simultaneously, and the panel floats above fullscreen apps so those accounts are reachable without leaving the task you're in.
The distinction that matters: if your problem is purely "I want two accounts while browsing", a browser profile or a Firefox container is free and does it better. This category earns its place when multi-account is one of several things you need at once — several web apps, one shortcut, over a fullscreen main task. If you take away the "over a fullscreen app" part, the free options win.
Tools in this space include Wavebox, Shift and Ferdium as well; they differ mainly in whether they want to be your whole workspace or a layer above it.
Picking
| Your situation | Use |
|---|---|
| Two accounts, occasional switching | Browser profiles |
| Several accounts, want them in one window | Firefox Multi-Account Containers |
| One-off check as another user | A private window |
| The boundary is real (shared Mac, client work) | A separate macOS user account |
| Multi-account is one of several web things you need over a fullscreen task | A web workspace with per-tab sessions |
One caution that applies to all of them: separating cookie jars separates sessions, not identity. Sites can still correlate you across jars by IP address, browser fingerprint or an account you sign into in both. If the goal is privacy rather than convenience, this is the wrong page — you're looking for a different set of tools, and this one will give you a false sense of security.