If you do any kind of work online, you will eventually find yourself owning multiple Gmail addresses. This problem becomes even worse when you have clients. There are several ways you can attack this problem and it all depends on what you’re looking to achieve here are 5 that I’ve tried.

Managing Multiple Gmail Addresses

Kiwi For Gmail

This is a nifty desktop app that lets you sign in and manage multiple Gmail addresses from your desktop. Not only does it let you manage Gmail, you can manage other Google Apps with it too like Google Calendars, Docs, Sheets and more. At the time of writing Kiwi for Gmail is completely free and available for both Windows and Mac. I’ve tried this myself and it’s pretty nice. However, I did not keep it because I wanted something that does more than just Gmail and Google Apps. But if that is all you are looking for, this is a good one. Can’t beat the price.

Use Gmail’s Native Switching

This is the method I’ve used for years on end to manage multiple gmail addresses. Here’s how you this this.

1. First, you need to figure out which is your most accessed Gmail account. While not necessary, I find it helps a lot. Once you sign into your primary account, click the account icon on the top right of your Gmail screen to reveal a drop down.
2. From here, simply click the Add Account button to log into your other accounts. You can do this however many times you need to add as many accounts – I have 6 hooked up.
3. Once you do finish logging into all your accounts, you’ll see them as a drop down (as show in the image above). You only need to hit the icon and click the account you want to switch to. Easy, clean, no other downloads or apps needed.

There is one caveat of this method. If you log out of one account, you’re logged out of all. It’s a good security measure but can also be a pain. Also, when opening a different account, it opens them in a different tag. Again, not a major thing, but does require extra clicking to ‘close’ the tab and as you know, more open tabs = more resources.

Shift

I tried this when they first came out. It was decent but gave up when they didn’t have the ability to log in with LastPass. LastPas is now added and I purchased it for a short time. Sadly, at my second attempt, I have to ask for a refund mostly because there were still some features like the native Gmail snooze which I use a lot. In addition, what I was looking for is something to reduce my dependency on the browser. While Shift can log you into other accounts like Trello, Evernote, Slack and all that, but many tools I use aren’t supported. So I didn’t achieve what I set out to do.

Overall, it’s not a bad option if all you want to do is manage multiple Gmail addresses.

Franz

This is a pretty interesting tool with a focus on messaging apps. So you can not only manage multiple Gmail addresses, you can manage WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, Slack and more through one app. If you do a lot of messaging this could be the one for you. Free and Open source makes it even more attractive.

Wavebox

This is very similar to Shift. You can manage multiple Gmail addresses but also log into various accounts in one. I currently have two Gmail addresses, Skype, Messenger, two help desks, Trello, Plutio, Canva, ActiveCampaign and two Slack workspaces connected. Whew! That’s a lot but it’s not all. You can literally take any site that you log in regularly and manage it there.

For me, the goal was beyond switching between multiple Gmail addresses. It was to reduce browser use simply because the browser can be a huge resource sucker when you have loads of tabs running to do what you need to do. So wouldn’t the same problem be present in Wavebox?

Not for me because Wavebox allows you to automatically sleep any apps that you aren’t using. This keeps the account accessible, but less demanding on your computer. It has worked out well for me and I’ve found my computer fan spinning up less these days. 

So which of these should you use? It all comes down to how much you want to manage. Just multiple Gmail addresses or more? If the former, either one of these options work. If the latter, I’d suggest Wavebox.