How to Create Multiple Profiles in Brave Browser

How Do You Create Multiple Profiles in Brave Browser?

Each Brave profile is its own browser identity: separate cookies, history, bookmarks, saved passwords, extensions and settings. You create one by clicking the profile icon in the top-right corner, choosing Create a new profile, naming it and confirming. If you are learning how to create multiple profiles in brave browser, the mechanics take under a minute per profile. What takes longer to understand is everything Brave still shares between them — flags, network settings, the proxy configuration and your device fingerprint.

Step by Step: Creating a New Brave Profile

Open Brave and look at the toolbar. Two routes lead to the same dialog, and the keyboard shortcut opens it without aiming at anything. This is how to create multiple profiles in brave browser in five steps, and the flow is the same on Windows, macOS and Linux — only the shortcut differs.

1. Open the profile picker. Click the profile icon at the right end of the address bar, or open the hamburger menu (the three-line button) and choose Create a new profile. On Windows press Ctrl+Shift+M, on macOS Cmd+Shift+M, and the profile menu opens directly.
2. Name the profile and pick a colour. “Shop A — Etsy seller” will still mean something in six months; “Profile 2” will not. The colour is what you recognise when four windows sit side by side on one monitor.
3. Confirm, and let Brave open the window. The new window starts clean — no cookies, no history, no saved logins, no extensions. It is not a copy of your main profile.
4. Repeat for every account you need. Your practical ceiling is RAM, because each open profile window runs its own set of processes alongside the others.
5. Verify the profile before you log in. The icon in that window should show the name and colour you just chose. This one check prevents the most common mistake in multi-account work: logging into account two inside profile one.

What to Check After the Profile Opens

Type brave://version into the address bar. The Profile Path line shows exactly which folder on disk this window writes to. On Windows that folder sits under AppData\Local\BraveSoftware\Brave-browser\User Data; on macOS under ~/Library/Application Support/BraveSoftware/Brave-browser/. Two windows with different profile paths are genuinely separate. Two windows with the same path are the same identity wearing two windows, and any isolation you assumed is imaginary.

Then check the search engine and homepage defaults, the Shields level that fits the account, and whether your expectations match what Shields actually blocks. On d3ward’s tracker test in October 2026, Brave Shields blocked 92 of 135 ad and tracker domains — strong coverage, not total. If you want to tune those choices deliberately rather than trusting defaults, this walkthrough of the Brave browser privacy settings guide explains what each toggle changes in practice.

What Brave Profiles Separate and What They Still Share

Profiles give you far more separation than private windows, but they are not a hard boundary. Some settings live at the installation level and apply to every profile created inside it — which is where most multi-account plans quietly break.

If you have set up multiple profiles in Google Chrome, the model will feel familiar — Chrome separates storage the same way. The tutorial on multiple profiles in Google Chrome covers the equivalent flow, and the same limitation applies there: you get separate logins, not a separate device.

Switching Between Profiles Without Losing Sessions

Knowing how to create multiple profiles in brave browser is only half the routine; the other half is moving between them without breaking sessions. Switching never closes the other profile. Click the profile icon, pick the profile you want, and Brave opens or focuses a window running under it. Everything in the first window stays signed in, because its cookies live in its own storage. That is the practical difference from a private window: a private window discards the session when you close it, a profile keeps it until you delete it.

The Shortcut Worth Memorising

Ctrl+Shift+M on Windows and Cmd+Shift+M on macOS open the profile menu directly. When you move between four or five accounts all day, that keyboard route becomes your main navigation. Keep an eye on links opened from other apps, too — the safe habit is pasting the URL into the window that belongs to the right account instead of letting a random profile pick it up.

When to Use the Guest Profile Instead

Guest gives you temporary access with nothing saved after the session ends. It is the right tool for opening a suspicious link or checking how a page looks with zero cookies. It is the wrong home for anything you must log into repeatedly, because every visit starts from zero and the site sees a brand-new visitor each time.

Brave Sync Across Multiple Profiles: What It Covers

Sync is per profile, and that is the part people get wrong. Each profile can join or leave a Sync chain on its own, so you can sync your personal profile to your phone and leave a client profile out of the chain entirely. Sync v2 works across any number of desktop, Android and iOS devices, uses client-side encryption, and protects the chain with a BIP39 recovery passphrase.

Two limits matter for multi-account work. First, per-profile Sync membership is possible, but coverage for some data types — Rewards among them — has still been in development, so do not assume everything travels. Second, Sync data lives on Brave’s servers: anything not accessed for 12 months is permanently deleted. If you park a project profile for a year and it relies on Sync to restore logins, the restore may be gone before the project resumes. Brave’s Sync FAQ documents both the encryption model and the 12-month rule.

Pitfalls That Break Multi-Account Setups in Brave

Most problems come from assuming a profile is a stronger boundary than it is. None of the failures below are fixed by learning how to create multiple profiles in brave browser more carefully — they are the edges of what profiles do at all.

1. Treating a new profile as a new device. The fingerprint — canvas hash, WebGL renderer, audio behaviour, font list, hardware concurrency, device memory — is identical in every profile. Sites that correlate accounts watch those signals.
2. Expecting a different IP per profile. Brave has no per-browser proxy configuration. Proxy settings are system-wide and affect every application, so all your profiles exit from the same address.
3. Forgetting that flags and Secure DNS are shared. Enable an experimental flag in one profile and you have enabled it in all of them, which can change how every other profile renders and behaves.
4. Deleting a profile to “clean up”. Deletion permanently removes that profile’s browsing data — there is no recycle bin. Export bookmarks and passwords first, or sign out of the accounts so the site sees a clean exit rather than an abandoned session.
5. Joining the same Sync chain from every profile. That turns separation into duplication: bookmarks, passwords and settings flow between profiles that were supposed to stay apart.
6. Doing client work in the Guest profile. Nothing is saved, so you re-authenticate constantly and often trigger the verification prompts you were trying to avoid.
7. Trusting defaults without reading them. Brave v1.96.59 added an Enable Sponsored Ads toggle under Data collection that ships turned on by default. Review it before you hand a profile to a client and assume their privacy expectations are met.

The Proxy Problem: Every Brave Profile Leaves From the Same IP

Here is the mechanism that breaks most Brave-based multi-account plans. A site does not only read your cookies. It logs your IP address, your timezone, your language, the WebRTC candidates your browser exposes and your fingerprint, then compares them against everything else that has hit the same endpoints. Brave profiles change exactly one variable in that list: the cookie jar.

Because Brave applies proxy settings at the system level, changing the exit IP means changing it for every application on the machine — which defeats the purpose the moment you need two accounts online simultaneously from different addresses. Proxy extensions can route traffic for a profile, but then you own the consistency work: WebRTC leaks, DNS resolution, and keeping timezone and locale aligned with the exit IP instead of contradicting it. The step-by-step guide to pairing browser profiles with proxies walks through that consistency check, and it applies to Brave profiles the same way it applies to any other Chromium build. An open request in Brave’s tracker, issue #59366, asks for Chrome-style per-profile isolation — a sign that people keep running into these edges.

When Profiles Are Not Enough: Fingerprint Isolation

If your work is simply staying signed into four marketplaces at once, Brave profiles are enough and you should stop reading here — you have the setup you need. If your work is running accounts that must not be linked, profiles cover the easy half of the problem and leave the hard half untouched.

Brave’s own fingerprinting protections reduce how much your browser volunteers, and they are worth enabling. We tested how far that goes in this analysis of Brave browser fingerprinting protection. The short version: randomization makes you harder to single out, but it does not turn one machine into several believable machines, and a profile that looks slightly different every session is its own kind of signal.

Send.win takes the other approach. It is an anti-detect browser with a native desktop app for Windows 10/11, macOS 12+ and Linux, built on a patched-Chromium engine with the Sendwin Stealth engine inside it. Canvas, WebGL, audio, fonts and hardware are spoofed at the engine level rather than injected by scripts, and they are kept coherent with each other, so each profile reads like a separate real machine instead of a browser wearing a mask. Every plan includes built-in residential proxies, and timezone, locale, WebRTC and geolocation follow the proxy’s exit IP automatically — the consistency work you would otherwise do by hand. Profiles can also run in the cloud on EU and US nodes from any device with nothing to install, free for 10 minutes a day and unlimited on Pro and Team, and sharing a profile with a paid teammate opens it already signed in, so no password ever changes hands.

Attaching Automation to an Isolated Profile

If you drive accounts programmatically, Send.win exposes a local Automation API on the Team plan for Selenium, Puppeteer and Playwright. You do not point Playwright at a browser binary; you connect it to a running profile over CDP, using the URL that profile shows in its automation settings.

from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright

# Copy each URL from the profile's automation settings in Sendwin Browser.
PROFILES = [
    "http://127.0.0.1:PORT1",
    "http://127.0.0.1:PORT2",
]

with sync_playwright() as p:
    for cdp_url in PROFILES:
        browser = p.chromium.connect_over_cdp(cdp_url)
        context = browser.contexts[0]
        page = context.new_page()
        page.goto("https://example.com/login")
        print(cdp_url, page.title())
        page.close()
        browser.close()  # disconnects Playwright from this profile

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I create a new profile in Brave?

Click the profile icon at the right end of the address bar, or open the hamburger menu and choose Create a new profile. Give it a name and a colour, confirm, and Brave opens a clean window running under that profile. Repeat the process for each account you want to keep apart — that is the whole routine for how to create multiple profiles in brave browser.

How do I switch between Brave profiles quickly?

Press Ctrl+Shift+M on Windows or Cmd+Shift+M on macOS to open the profile menu, then pick the profile you want. Brave opens or focuses a window for it while the other profile keeps its sessions intact. Clicking the toolbar profile icon does the same thing.

Where does Brave store profile data?

On Windows, under AppData\Local\BraveSoftware\Brave-browser\User Data. On macOS, under ~/Library/Application Support/BraveSoftware/Brave-browser/. The Profile Path line in brave://version shows the exact folder for the window you are looking at, which is the fastest way to confirm two windows are truly separate.

Do Brave profiles have separate extensions?

Yes. An extension installed in one profile is not available in any other profile, and installing it again in a second profile creates a separate copy with its own settings. That is why a brand-new profile feels empty even when your main profile is full of tools.

Are Brave profiles completely isolated?

Not completely. Cookies, history, bookmarks, extensions, saved logins and most settings are per profile, but flags, Secure DNS and some network settings are shared across the installation, and every profile reports the same device fingerprint. That is enough for staying signed into different accounts, and not enough for hiding that all of them run on one machine.

Can I set a different proxy for each Brave profile?

No. Brave does not support per-browser proxy configuration; proxy settings are system-wide and affect every application on the machine, so all profiles share one exit IP. If each account needs its own address, you need a browser that assigns a proxy per profile.

Can I sync bookmarks between Brave profiles?

Only by joining both profiles to the same Sync chain, which also syncs passwords and settings between them. Each profile can join or leave a chain independently, so decide deliberately — syncing two profiles that are meant to stay separate cancels the separation you created.

What happens to Sync data if I stop using a profile?

Sync server data that has not been accessed for 12 months is permanently deleted. If a parked profile depends on Sync to restore its logins later, export anything critical or keep the profile active enough to reset the clock.

How Send.win Helps With How To Create Multiple Profiles In Brave Browser

Send.win is an antidetect browser built for exactly this kind of work — every profile is a clean, isolated identity:

• Isolated profiles – unique fingerprint, separate cookies and storage per profile
• Stealth engine – canvas, WebGL, fonts, and audio spoofed at the engine level
• Desktop app + cloud sessions – native app for Windows, macOS, and Linux, or run profiles in the cloud with no install
• Built-in residential proxies – with automatic timezone, locale, and WebRTC matching
• Team features – share logged-in profiles with teammates without sharing passwords

Try the instant cloud browser demo — no install, no signup — or download the desktop app. The 30-day free trial needs no credit card, and paid plans start at $6.99/month billed annually (see pricing).

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