How to switch between multiple Codex accounts in 2026: 7 ways compared

Disclosure: Enjoy is our product, and it keeps several Codex accounts signed in. We checked every way below against OpenAI’s documentation and each maker’s own pages on November 2, 2026, and we say where another way is the better pick, including the free ones that need nothing but Codex.

The ways to use more than one Codex account, compared

People keep a second ChatGPT account for Codex for one of two reasons: a work plan beside a personal one, or a spare for when the first runs out. Codex keeps one login per CODEX_HOME folder, ~/.codex unless you change it, and OpenAI’s account switcher isn’t in its desktop app yet, so the questions are how you switch, whether both accounts stay signed in, and whether anything switches for you. Codex itself has no account switcher: a feature request for “First-class multi-account auth,” open since September 2025, says users “must manually swap CODEX_HOME, copy auth files, or repeatedly log in and out.”

Way	Best for	Price, checked November 2, 2026	Signed in at once	Switches for you	Runs on
codex logout and codex login	Changing accounts now and then	Free with Codex	One	No	Mac, Windows, Linux
A CODEX_HOME per account	A work and a personal account, side by side	Free with Codex	One per folder	No	Mac, Windows, Linux
ChatGPT’s account switcher	Codex on the web and your phone	Free with ChatGPT	Two	No	Web, iPhone, Android
codex-auth	Switching from a terminal	Free, open source	One; restart Codex after a switch	No	Mac, Windows, Linux
Codex Switcher	A desktop app and menu bar for switching	Free, open source	One; close Codex before a switch	No	Mac, Windows, Linux
Cockpit Tools	Codex beside Antigravity, Copilot, Cursor and other apps’ accounts	Free	Several, one per Codex instance	Through its local API Service	Mac, Windows, Linux
Enjoy	Every account signed in, one per project, without a terminal	A monthly subscription, free for 7 days, with your phone and other computers (pricing)	Every account you add	Yes, when one runs out	Mac, Windows, Linux

Every account is a ChatGPT plan of its own. Codex’s pricing gives Free, at $0, and Go, at $8 a month, “GPT-6 Luna at Standard speed in the desktop app, subject to rollout.” Plus, at $20 a month, adds “Codex on the web, in the CLI, in the IDE extension, and on iOS,” and Pro comes at $100, $200 or $500 a month. Business is $20 a user a month billed yearly, for two or more users, or $25 billed monthly.

Before you start: what’s allowed, and the device limit

• More than one account is allowed; sharing one isn’t. OpenAI’s account switching article says “You can have more than 2 ChatGPT accounts,” and its Terms of Use say “You may not share your account credentials or make your account available to anyone else.” The same terms forbid trying to “circumvent any rate limits or restrictions,” and OpenAI hasn’t said whether a second paid plan bought for more Codex usage counts. Our help guide covers what does get accounts suspended.
• Two paid plans may not work on one computer. “ChatGPT also limits how many paid accounts you can use on one device. If you see Device limit reached, you can’t use that paid account on this device,” says OpenAI’s device limits article. Go, Plus and the three Pro plans count, while “ChatGPT Free and ChatGPT Business, Enterprise, and Edu workspace plans do not count toward the limit,” and “signing out of an account does not guarantee that another paid account becomes eligible.” OpenAI hasn’t published the number. Every way below runs into it, Enjoy included, and our memo on the limit has the details.
• Check which account is in use. codex login status shows “the active authentication method,” per Codex’s authentication docs, and the desktop app’s profile menu shows “the active account or API key status.” One login can also belong to more than one workspace, and OpenAI separates the two: “Switching accounts changes which ChatGPT account you are using. Switching workspaces changes the workspace within an account.”
• A work computer may decide for you. An administrator can set forced_chatgpt_workspace_id to “restrict users to a specific workspace,” and “If the active credentials don’t match the configured restrictions, Codex logs the user out and exits.”
• A saved login is a password. Codex keeps it “in a plaintext file at ~/.codex/auth.json or in your OS-specific credential store,” and its docs say to “treat ~/.codex/auth.json like a password: it contains access tokens.” The community switchers below keep a copy of each account’s tokens on your computer to swap them in.

codex logout and codex login, one account at a time

Best for: changing accounts now and then, such as moving to your work plan for the afternoon.

Codex’s authentication docs give both halves: “run codex logout to clear the current credentials,” then “Run codex login, then complete the browser flow,” signing in with the other account. In the ChatGPT desktop app, open the profile menu and “Select Log out to clear the current credentials,” then, on the signed-out screen, “select Continue to sign in.” The CLI and the IDE extension “share the same cached login details,” so a switch in one is a switch in the other. Your settings and sessions stay where they were, because CODEX_HOME holds “config, auth, logs, sessions, skills,” and only the login changes.

Price: free with Codex. Codex’s pricing lists the CLI and the IDE extension from Plus; Free and Go get Codex in the desktop app.

Watch for: there’s one login at a time, so every switch means signing in again in your browser. On a computer without one, codex login --device-auth signs in with a code instead, once you “Enable device code login in your ChatGPT security settings.” And a second paid account can still be turned away with Device limit reached.

A CODEX_HOME per account

Best for: a work and a personal account, both signed in, with nothing to install.

CODEX_HOME “Sets the root for Codex state, including config, auth, logs, sessions, skills, and standalone package metadata,” per Codex’s environment variables reference, so a second folder is a second Codex with its own login. “If you set it, the directory must already exist,” so make it once, with mkdir ~/.codex-work, then add an alias to ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc:

alias codex-work='CODEX_HOME=~/.codex-work codex'

Run codex-work login once to sign in your work account. Even when Codex keeps the login in your operating system’s credential store, its source names the entry after the folder’s path, so the two logins stay apart. From then on codex-work uses it while codex keeps your personal one, and two terminals can run the two accounts at the same time. It’s the workaround the feature request describes, done with one documented variable.

Price: free with Codex, from Plus for the CLI.

Watch for: everything in the folder is separate, so your config.toml, skills and sessions don’t carry from one account to the other, and you set up each folder on its own. The reference lists the variable for the “CLI, IDE extension, app-server, installers,” not the ChatGPT desktop app. And two paid personal plans side by side may meet the device limit, though a Business, Enterprise or Edu account beside your own plan doesn’t count toward it.

ChatGPT’s account switcher, on the web and your phone

Best for: Codex in ChatGPT on the web or your phone, with a work and a personal account.

“You can stay signed in to up to 2 ChatGPT accounts at a time and switch between them without signing out,” says OpenAI’s help center, and “Account switching is available on ChatGPT web and in the ChatGPT iOS and Android apps.” On the web, open the account menu and select Add account; on a phone, open Settings, then Switch account. “Each account keeps its own plan,” and switching doesn’t “Combine billing or subscriptions” or “Move chats between accounts.” OpenAI’s release notes say it began “rolling out to the ChatGPT iOS and Android apps” on October 30.

Price: free with ChatGPT; each account needs its own plan for Codex.

Watch for: it isn’t in the desktop app yet. On October 31, OpenAI’s Thibault Sottiaux posted, “You can now easily switch between multiple accounts on mobile, and coming soon to desktop too,” without a date. It holds two accounts, and “If 2 accounts are already signed in, log out of one before adding another.” Its limit is a different one from the device limit: “Device limits are separate from account switching limits.”

codex-auth

Best for: switching Codex accounts from a terminal, free.

codex-auth “is a command-line tool for switching Codex accounts,” free under the MIT license, with more than 2,800 stars on GitHub and builds for macOS, Windows and Linux. It installs with npm install -g @loongphy/codex-auth and works with the “Codex CLI,” the “VS Code extension” and the “Codex App.” codex-auth login runs codex login and adds the account, codex-auth list shows each account’s usage, and codex-auth switch moves to another, by number or by an alias you give it.

Price: free.

Watch for: in the CLI and the desktop app, you “switch accounts, then restart the client for the new account to take effect.” Its usage readout sends “your ChatGPT access token to OpenAI’s servers,” and its README warns that this “may be detected by OpenAI and could violate their terms of service, potentially leading to account suspension or other risks.” --skip-api reads Codex’s local files instead, which “can lag by several hours.” Its app command, for switching without restarting the desktop app, “is experimental and may never become a stable feature.”

Codex Switcher

Best for: a desktop app and menu bar for switching accounts and watching each one’s limits.

Codex Switcher is “A Desktop Application for Managing Multiple OpenAI Codex Accounts,” free under the MIT license, with more than 900 stars on GitHub and builds for macOS, Windows and Linux. You sign in each account with ChatGPT or import its auth.json, then switch “from the main window, native tray menu, or tray popup.” Each account’s card shows “the current 5-hour and weekly limit windows, remaining percentage, reset timing, credit balance, and subscription expiry,” and the resets on each account, which it calls “manual reset credits.” It can also “Warm up one account or all accounts manually, after each 5-hour reset window, or at specific scheduled times of day.”

Price: free.

Watch for: its README now opens with “Reminder: perhaps you no longer need this software,” above Sottiaux’s post that switching is coming to the desktop app. You need to “close the running app before switching accounts.” Its Mac builds “are not Apple-notarized,” so macOS may say the app is damaged, and the README’s fix removes the quarantine flag. Its latest release, 0.2.20, came out on September 19.

Cockpit Tools

Best for: Codex accounts beside those of Antigravity, GitHub Copilot, Cursor and other coding apps, in one desktop app.

Cockpit Tools is “A universal AI IDE account management tool,” with more than 19,000 stars on GitHub, the most of any tool here, for macOS, Windows and Linux. It manages 16 apps’ accounts, Codex among them, with “one-click switching, quota monitoring, wake-up tasks, and multi-instance parallel runs, helping you fully utilize resources from different accounts.” For Codex, it shows each account’s “Hourly and Weekly quota status,” and you can “open two Codex instances, bind different accounts, and handle different projects independently.” Its API Service is a local gateway that Codex can run through, picking from a pool of your accounts. It runs on your computer and “does not require a separate cloud account for this project,” and its Mac releases are signed and notarized.

Price: free.

Watch for: GitHub lists no license for its code. Its wake-up tasks “Schedule AI model wake-ups to trigger quota reset cycles in advance,” and OpenAI’s terms forbid trying to “circumvent any rate limits or restrictions”; OpenAI hasn’t said where pooling or pre-starting your own accounts’ limits falls. An open request from October 31 asks it to recognize accounts that hit OpenAI’s device limit.

Enjoy

Best for: keeping every Codex account signed in, one per project, and moving a conversation to one with usage left, without a terminal.

Enjoy is a desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux that runs Codex, Claude Code, Grok Build, Antigravity, Muse Code, and local models through OpenCode, on the plans you already have. Its saved accounts “stay signed in side by side, so you can switch without signing out,” and each one signs in “through the agent itself, on Anthropic’s or OpenAI’s own sign-in page, the same way it would in a terminal.” What it adds:

• An account per project. A work project stays on your work plan and a personal one on yours. One of the accounts is the sign-in Codex also uses in your terminal.
• Usage side by side. Each signed-in account shows the limits Codex reports for your plan, such as 5 hours and Weekly, with its credits and free resets, so you can compare before you choose.
• It switches when one runs out. Enjoy “switches this project to the first one that still has usage, and the conversation continues there on its own,” or, if you’d rather, waits for the reset and carries on.
• The conversation comes along. Codex accounts “share conversations, so a conversation usually carries on where it left off after you switch.” When every account is out, another agent, such as Claude Code on a Claude plan, can pick up the conversation.

Price: Enjoy is one monthly subscription, and the first seven days are free, with a card to start. It includes your phone and any browser and your other computers, and each teammate you invite needs a subscription of their own. See pricing.

Watch for: Enjoy doesn’t change OpenAI’s limits, and each account is a plan you pay for. OpenAI’s device limit applies in Enjoy as it does everywhere else, and Enjoy can’t get a blocked account past it. Enjoy runs the Codex CLI, which OpenAI’s pricing lists from Plus. On Windows, saved accounts need Developer Mode turned on, except in projects inside WSL. A key set up for the agent on your computer “overrides every account, so saved accounts can’t separate them.” Waiting for a reset needs your computer on, with Enjoy open, when the usage resets. Enjoy isn’t open source, it’s a monthly subscription on top of your ChatGPT plans once the free week ends, and scheduled workflows run only while your computer is awake with Enjoy open.

When one account is enough

If the second account is only for running out, a bigger plan or credits on the one you have is simpler, and it’s the route OpenAI points to. Its device limits article says “If you need more usage, check the options available on an account you already use, such as eligible credit purchases or usage resets,” and on the Codex feature request, a Codex maintainer replied “we offer the ability to purchase additional credits if you need more usage on top of your subscription.” Plus is $20 a month, Pro starts at $100, and “Pro plans currently have no five-hour limit.” Starting in December, Plus, Pro and Business plans’ “usage allowance will be shared across ChatGPT and Codex,” says OpenAI’s usage article, as our memo explains. Our Plus vs Pro guide compares the plans, and our usage limit guide covers resets, credits and the other ways through a limit.

Keep two when they really are two: an employer’s workspace and your own plan. Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts don’t count toward the device limit, and work you do for an employer belongs on the account it pays for. For that, a CODEX_HOME per account is free and takes one line.

How we compared

We read OpenAI’s Codex documentation on authentication, environment variables, configuration and pricing, its help center articles on account switching, device limits and usage, its release notes and Terms of Use, the Codex feature request on GitHub, Thibault Sottiaux’s post, and the READMEs and releases of codex-auth, Codex Switcher and Cockpit Tools on November 2, 2026, and every one is linked below. The three community tools are among the most-starred Codex account switchers on GitHub that day, and their licenses and star counts come from GitHub. We quote each maker’s own words for its limits and leave out what it hasn’t documented, and we didn’t test the community tools ourselves. OpenAI has said account switching is coming to its desktop app, so we recheck this guide against its sources at least once a month, and the date at the foot of the page says when we last did.