Run isolated, parallel copies of any Windows app — so you can be signed into several accounts at once.
Two Chrome profiles. Three Telegram accounts. A work Slack and a client Slack. Each copy gets its own profile, so each one is a separate login.
-4F5BD5){kind=icon}
Most desktop apps refuse to start twice, and keep exactly one login folder — so a second launch just focuses the first window. Getting a genuinely separate second copy needs a different trick per app, and that is the whole idea here:
| Technique | How it works | Apps |
|---|---|---|
| Profile flag | The app takes a flag that relocates its entire profile. Most reliable. | Chrome, Edge, Brave, Firefox, Signal, Element, Slack, VS Code, Obsidian, qBittorrent, Thunderbird |
| Multi-instance flag | A flag permits a second instance, plus one for its data. | Telegram Desktop |
| Separate builds | The vendor ships parallel builds that each keep their own account. | Discord Stable / PTB / Canary |
| Isolated profile | No flag — the copy is launched with its environment redirected into a private folder. | Portable apps and anything you add yourself |
Parallel Space keeps a catalog of these recipes, detects which of them you have installed, and adds them as one-click "spaces". Anything not in the catalog you can add yourself and pick the technique.
The honest caveat. The isolated-profile fallback cannot separate accounts for apps that resolve their data folder through the Windows known-folder API rather than the environment — Discord is the notable one, which is exactly why it uses separate builds instead. Recipes in the catalog say which technique they use so you always know what you are getting.
 Catalog — ready-made recipes, with installed apps detected |
 Appearance — six themes, switched live |
- 🗂️ Spaces — each an isolated copy with Launch / Close, a live status dot, and its own data folder.
- ◈ Catalog — 15 recipes covering browsers, chat, mail and tools.
- 🔍 Detected on this PC — a quick-add strip built from your Start Menu.
- ✏️ Full editor — name, program, arguments, working folder, isolation, icon and
colour.
{DATA}in the arguments means "this space's private folder". - ◐ Six themes — Midnight, Nord, Carbon, Ember, Daylight (light) and Matrix. Every palette is contrast-checked: primary text ≥ 7:1 on every surface, secondary ≥ 4.5:1, white on accent ≥ 4.5:1.
- 📦 Zero install — one self-contained
.exe. No .NET runtime, no admin rights.
The same app in Daylight — themes repaint everything, including the dialogs
- Grab
ParallelSpace-v1.1.0-win-x64.zipfrom Releases. - Unzip and run
ParallelSpace.exe.
Windows 10/11 (x64). The build isn't code-signed, so SmartScreen may warn on first run — choose More info → Run anyway.
Catalog → Add space on anything marked Installed, then Launch it from Spaces. For a second account, add the same app again — the button becomes Add another — which creates a second space with its own private folder. Launch both and sign each into a different account.
(Adding it twice is what gives you two profiles. Pressing Launch twice on one space just reuses that space's folder, so the app's own single-instance handling takes over.)
For an app that isn't in the catalog, + Add app… on the Spaces page, or click it
in the Detected on this PC strip. Choose Isolated profile unless the app has
its own profile flag — if it does, put the flag in Arguments and use {DATA}:
--user-data-dir="{DATA}"
For several Discord accounts: add Discord, Discord PTB and Discord Canary from the catalog. They are separate installs with separate data folders, which is what gives each one its own account — no patching involved.
Spaces are saved to %APPDATA%\ParallelSpace\spaces.json, and each space's data
lives under %APPDATA%\ParallelSpace\Spaces\<id>. Closing the manager leaves your
launched apps running.
Each launch is created suspended, put into its own Windows job object, and then resumed. That ordering matters: many apps start through a stub that spawns the real process and exits immediately (Squirrel/Electron updaters, Store app stubs), and anything that assigns the job after starting the process loses that race — the real app escapes the job, the space reports "Stopped", and Close does nothing.
Because each copy has its own job, Close terminates that copy's whole process tree and nothing outside it. The job carries no kill-on-close limit, so quitting Parallel Space leaves your apps running.
One exception: Discord channel spaces are tracked and closed by process image name, because a channel is a single install that may already be running from outside Parallel Space. Closing one ends every running copy of that channel.
Requires the .NET 9 SDK.
git clone https://github.com/dboudreau00/ParallelSpace.git
cd ParallelSpace
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File tools/run.ps1 # build + run
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File tools/build.ps1 # build Release
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File tools/package.ps1 # zip a release into dist/Adding an app to the catalog is a few lines — see CONTRIBUTING.md.
src/ParallelSpace/
Assets/ appicon.ico, logo.png (generated by tools/IconGen)
Models/ Space, AppPreset, AppTheme, IsolationMode
Services/
AppCatalog.cs the app recipes + installed-app detection
DiscordDetector.cs the three Discord release channels
Launcher.cs exe resolution, {DATA}, isolation, job tracking, close
JobObject.cs Windows job object wrapper
ProcessStarter.cs CreateProcess suspended -> assign to job -> resume
SpaceStore.cs spaces.json (atomic) + per-space data folders
AppScanner.cs Start Menu shortcuts -> detected apps
ThemeManager.cs applies a theme to the live resource dictionary
ViewModels/ MainWindow, Space, EditSpace, CatalogItem, ThemeOption
Views/ MainWindow, EditSpaceWindow (Avalonia XAML)
tools/
IconGen/ draws the app icon + logo
Harness/ headless check of the service layer
StubApp/ test fixture: a launcher stub that spawns a child and exits
build.ps1 / run.ps1 / package.ps1
C# / .NET 9, Avalonia 11 with MVVM (CommunityToolkit.Mvvm). No admin rights; everything runs as the current user. The theme palettes were designed in Magic Patterns and verified against WCAG.
- Windows only (x64).
- The isolated-profile fallback can't split accounts for apps that read their data folder from the Windows known-folder API (see the caveat above).
- Not code-signed, so expect a SmartScreen prompt on first run.
MIT.