[FEATURE] I built an app for this: Multi Instance for Claude Desktop (run isolated instances side by side)

Update (Sep 2026): two things have changed since I opened this, so I am editing rather than leaving stale information on a page people still land on from search.

Price: it is $9.49 on the Microsoft Store, a one-time purchase with no subscription. Earlier versions of this post and my comments on the related issues said "free", which was true at the time and is not any more.

Engines: each instance can now run on a different AI engine, not only a different Anthropic account. One window on your Anthropic subscription, another on Kimi (Moonshot), GLM (Z.AI), DeepSeek, OpenAI, OpenRouter or a local Ollama model, side by side on the same machine. The reason that is not a five-minute script: ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL is a global environment variable, so changing it moves every window at once. Each instance instead carries its own token, and a local bridge maps token to instance to engine to key and rewrites the model name in flight, because Claude Desktop sends claude-opus-5 and Kimi will reject that outright.

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Problem Statement

Many users (see #18435, #36821, #30154, #49965, #32783) need to run multiple Claude Desktop instances at once, one per project or account, because Claude Desktop only allows a single instance. With several projects, contexts bleed together: plans, sessions and accounts all collide in one window.

What I built

Multi Instance for Claude Desktop (Windows, Microsoft Store), $9.49:
https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9NG247TJ47P0?cid=gh-issue-70665

And Multi Instance Pro, same price, which is the one that adds the per-instance AI engine:
https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9N3X1FSCLMWK?cid=gh-issue-70665-pro

• Multiple isolated Claude Desktop instances side by side, each with its own profile, session, account, MCP servers and colour
• A per-instance AI engine (Anthropic, Kimi/Moonshot, GLM/Z.AI, DeepSeek, OpenAI, OpenRouter, Ollama)
• Dashboard to create, launch and delete instances
• Isolation via --user-data-dir per instance

Known limitation, unchanged: claude:// deep links are global, so each instance needs a one-time manual sign-in.

Built by Carlos De La Torre. Disclosure: it is my own paid app.