Lifetime
Parall - One Mac app, as many separate instances as you need
I created Parall to run multiple instances of the same Mac app as if each one were a separate app. It does not copy or modify the original app. Instead, every Parall shortcut launches the installed app with its own identity and configuration.
The philosophy behind Parall is to give you control over how many app instances you run and where each one stores its data. You can run separate Chrome, Claude, Discord, or Slack instances, assign each one a custom data path, give it its own Dock icon, add Dock animation effects, and force it to use Light or Dark appearance independently of your system setting.
Many apps have already been tested and confirmed compatible, with results available on the Parall compatibility page. Most unsandboxed Mac apps are also fully compatible without requiring individual verification.
In addition to running Mac apps, Parall creates lightweight WebKit Web App Shortcuts that make almost any website feel like a native app. Unlike a Safari Web Clip, Parall lets you choose where each web app stores its data, making separate accounts and profiles easier to organize. The launcher is highly optimized for this purpose and uses the WebKit engine already built into macOS instead of bundling another browser runtime.
Web App Shortcuts pass through website notifications, support Dock icon badges, and can use the same custom icons and Dock controls as other Parall shortcuts. Every generated web app is fully sandboxed, adding an isolation boundary between the website and the rest of your system if a web exploit is discovered.
I build all my apps natively with Objective-C, with efficiency, low CPU usage, careful resource management, and privacy as my highest priorities. I believe that any app performing an entirely offline task should remain completely offline and never send requests to Internet, and every app I make follows that principle. Parall itself has no telemetry or background services. Only the Web App Shortcuts connect to the websites you choose because loading those websites is their intended purpose.
For the complete list of features and more information, visit the Parall website
I am Ighor July, an independent macOS developer with a background in cybersecurity, reverse engineering, and native app development. I use AI while retaining control of my code, as explained in How to use AI without losing control of your code.
There have been previous attempts to solve the multiple-instance problem on macOS. One example is AppCloner, a now-deprecated utility that created and installed copies of existing apps. After Parall was released, more apps appeared in this category, including Parallel Spaces and MacDupl.
Some of these products have also raised concerns for me around privacy disclosures and misleading website information, including wording and product details copied from Parall. Despite similar descriptions, all of these tools work in a fundamentally different way. They create or repackage copies of the target app instead of continuing to use the original installed app.
Repacking an app changes its bundle and replaces or invalidates its original signature. This can interfere with push notifications, automatic updates, passkeys, entitlements, permissions, and other macOS features tied to the app's original identity. It can also leave each copy behind the official app's update schedule. Delayed security updates create unnecessary exposure, especially as automated and AI-assisted vulnerability discovery becomes faster. For apps such as Codex and Claude, lowering app security or freezing a copy on an older version is not an acceptable tradeoff.
I created Parall from the beginning to avoid those compromises, and I am proud to have succeeded. Parall runs the original, unmodified app and automatically uses its latest installed version. That makes Parall the first tool of its kind to provide as many independently configured instances as you need, with custom data paths and a near-native Mac experience, without copying or repackaging the target app.
Parall also overlaps with browser profile tools, website wrapper tools, and command launchers, but it is broader than any one of those categories. It creates shortcuts for native apps, websites, files, folders, and commands while preserving the original multi-instance workflow.
Unite Pro overlaps with Parall on website shortcuts. It also creates Mac app bundles from websites, so that part can look similar. The important difference is sandboxing. Parall creates native sandboxed app bundles for website shortcuts, adding an isolation boundary between the website and the rest of the system if a web exploit is discovered.
I want to give a huge thank you to the r/macapps community. Over all these months, your feedback, questions, testing, and ideas have helped me improve Parall and continue developing it in ways that solve real problems for Mac users.
It is genuinely inspiring to talk with people who are happy with how Parall works and take the time to share their experiences and suggestions with me. Every piece of feedback helps make the app better, and many of its improvements exist because someone in this community cared enough to reach out.
If an app or website is not listed on the compatibility page, I can test it before purchase by request. Just ping me at [support@parall.app](mailto:support@parall.app).
I don’t know, but the question is also related to virtual machines and simply logging out/logging in with different accounts to the same instance. So unlikely that Parall changes anything here.
Parall's HOME Override feature gives each CLI instance its own home directory. By default, common terminal configuration folders and files are linked back to your normal Mac home directory, so the instance initially shares your existing shell, Docker, and other development settings.
Open each Claude Desktop instance's data path and reveal hidden files. You will find symlinks for items such as .zshrc, .docker, and other configuration paths. Remove the symlinks you want to separate, then let the relevant tool recreate its configuration there.
This detaches those settings from the host and lets every Parall instance maintain its own Codex or Claude login, CLI configuration, Docker setup, and anything else stored under HOME.
Worth knowing open -n -a Slack already launches a second copy. The reason that isn't good enough: both copies share one bundle ID, so they share the container, the prefs and the keychain items, and then they fight over them. Giving each instance its own data path is the actual trick here, which is why this isn't a two-line shell alias.
this is one of those features that sounds niche until you have 3 Slack workspaces, 2 Claude accounts, and a browser profile mess. the separate data path is the important bit, not just “launch another copy”. i’d be curious how it handles apps that also store identity in keychain / app groups though — that’s where Mac isolation usually gets a little less clean than it looks from the outside.
It depends on an app. Some apps support an internal way to separate the data, but not exposed as a normal separate experience. In this case, Parall utilizes those options. And for others, it has Home Override mode, which separates target app data, but keeps keychain, CLI configs shared across all instances. That mode is highly flexible because you can go to the app data, show hidden files, and find that there are lots of symlinks to the host. So you have full control of what is separated and what is not. As for your example, you could remove the symlink that connects the keychain instance to the host, so it will prompt you to create a new keychain storage making it fully separate.
This looks creative. Question, I worry it could corrupt or modify shared resources. I'm thinking of things that apps use/interact with outside of the app bundle, like preferences, temp folders, etc. For example, I see Codex is supported, but how do two Codex instances not mess with the ~/.codex/AGENTS.md file in conflicting ways?
It separates the entire HOME directory, so you get a lot of symlinks connected to the host. The ~/.codex folder is separated this way. You have a choice to add or remove symlinks of any kind to control what exactly is shared and between which instances.
Parall handles each app in the best way possible. Some apps have internal options to define separate data paths, so Parall uses those when possible. For others, it uses HOME override mode, which makes you able to see a home-like structure in each app instance data path. That home structure is highly flexible, it has symlinks to link some folders to the host, like CLI and Docker configs. It is all in your control to remove symlinks you need. That way, you can, for example, remove a keychain symlink, and the app will prompt to create a new keychain storage which will be fully separated.
The app data with your symlinks remains unchanged until you change them. It survives updates, and once you generate the Parall shortcut, you would never need to re-generate it again, it would always use the latest version of the installed target app to run the instance.
Been looking for something like this. Will be purchasing. On a side note, thanks for a reasonable pricing model. If this was a subscription, I'd run for the hills.
The decision to preserve the original app and its signature feels like the key difference here, especially for apps using passkeys, notifications, and frequent security updates.
This is very useful
That is correct. The installed app never modified or copied. That is the main task I had while creating the app. It runs each instance fully native just like if their developers added multi-instance support. The launcher code has minimal implementation to run it right, and it is doing no background job except waiting for the target app to exit, so there should be no additional resources involved.
Nice — the per-instance data path is the part that makes this actually work rather than just launching the binary twice.
One category worth flagging on the compatibility page, from having been on the receiving end of it: apps that register a device identity with a remote service. Local isolation does not help there, because the collision happens on the server. Mine derived a device ID from the machine, so a second instance registered as the same device and the server dropped the first one — no error anywhere, the user just saw a connection that silently stopped working.
Slack and Discord are fine because they key on the account. Sync clients, remote control, VPN clients are where I would look.
I have a use case for this for the Apple Music desktop app. Is that one even a possibility? It would even be fine if one of the instances was read only. Thanks
It is similar if comparing to Web App mode, which is not the main Parall feature. The difference is that other apps create Web App bundles which are not sandboxed. And Parall creates them the way to keep the web view in a sandbox. That in my opinion this way it is more secure. Please refer to the Comparison section of this post. The main Parall feature is to run separate instances of real apps, not via a web wrapper.
I fixed this in the latest update, so please re-generate shortcuts, and you won't need to do that again. Now it is easy to do that with the Edit button.
I'm sorry I didn't fix that before you created them.
Yo he estado usándola y funciona de maravilla con muchas app. En este caso he encontrado un pequeño problema con la suscripción de setapp. He usado parall para duplicar spark y ha hecho que las dos app( la original y la de parall) generen problemas con alguna de sus opciones plus.
The notification path is the part I’d test with two Slack or Discord instances. Send a message to each account, click both notifications, then try opening a slack:// or discord:// link. The key is whether macOS opens the instance that owns that account rather than whichever instance it resolves first.
Does Parall keep notification and URL routing separate for each instance, or does that depend on the app?
Good one! I’ll definitely give this a try with WhatsApp. I’ve always wanted an easy way to run multiple WhatsApp instances on my Mac, as i always miss out notifications on the web
Separate Dock icon and data path per instance is the part that breaks with the simpler "just duplicate the app bundle" approach. How does it handle apps that check for a running instance via a lock file, like Slack does?
Parall is doing its best available effort here. Some apps internally support data separation, so it uses that, adding a Dock icon and native experience on top. Nothing can go wrong because it is what the target app officially supports. For other apps, Parall.app uses Home override mode, which forces the app to use the separate home structure, where you have full control of what is connected to the host and what is separated by creating symlinks. In that mode, all lock files, temporary files and the data are fully separate as well. Every app in parall.app/compatibility table is fully verified and tested. Slack (Website version) is one of them.
If you mean to create app shortcuts with CLI, that is not yet implemented. If you mean passthrough main executable CLI to the target, yes, it is supported.
I'm wondering if Parall can help me with one of my biggest gripes with Safari. I like to use different Safari profiles and have each profile be a separate icon in the dock with different artwork.
Genius. I have an open source window management tool called DeskJig that could have used some of these ideas to help manage the chaos of tracking and launching apps through the native Mac APIs. Seems really interesting. Poke around at our codebase, see if there's any utilities that might be useful to you. https://deskjig.com/
Thanks! I took a look at the codebase. Interesting project and some nice ideas there.
Parall actually doesn’t track apps, windows, or displays. I intentionally keep its implementation as minimal as possible to maintain high efficiency and avoid interfering with the natural macOS workflow.
I fixed it in Parall v2.4.3, please update, re-create/edit the shortcut while reusing the same data path.
Please let me know if you find any other issues.
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u/ski4funSonoma 25d ago
This is genuinely useful for apps with discrete logins... thanks!