If you’re a busy professional or student who wants to keep your work and school life separate, then you may want to consider using two or more Skype accounts. This way, you can easily access both of them from one computer or device. You can also use two or more accounts to communicate with people in different parts of the world, without having to switch between them. Here are some tips on how to sign into two or more Skype accounts at once:
- Open the Skype app on your computer or device and sign in with your first account.
- Open the other account’s settings and click on the “Add Account” button.
- Enter your name and password for the new account and click on “Create Account.”
- Once you’ve created an account, open it and click on the “Accounts” tab. You’ll see a list of all of your existing Skype accounts. Click on the “New Account” button and enter your name and password for the new account into the fields below. Click on “Create Account.”
Skype doesn’t offer an obvious way to use multiple accounts at the same time. You don’t have to log out and log back in — you can sign into as many Skype accounts as you want via the web, Windows, Mac, or Linux Skype applications.
This may be helpful if you have separate Skype accounts for personal use and work, for example. No such tricks are available for Android, iPhone, or iPad — you’re stuck with a single account on the mobile Skype apps.
Web
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This has become easier now that there’s a web version of Skype available. The web version even supports voice and video chats on Windows and Mac OS X.
If you’re already running Skype on your computer, you can simply open the Skype web app at web.skype.com and log in with a secondary user account. You’ll then be using two different Skype accounts at the same time.
To use even more user accounts, you could open your browser’s incognito or private-browsing mode and sign into Skype from there — you could have one account signed in in normal-browsing mode and a second in private-browsing mode. Or, use multiple different web browsers (or even browser profiles) to sign into as many different accounts as you want on Skype for web.
Windows
To launch a second Skype application on Windows, press Windows Key + R to open the Run dialog, copy-paste the below command into it, and press Enter.
On a 64-bit version of Windows — you’re probably using a 64-bit version of Windows — run the following command:
On a 32-bit version of Windows, run the following command:
You can repeat this process to open a third, fourth, and other additional copies of Skype. Sign into each Skype window with a new account.
(If you installed Skype to a different folder on your computer instead of the default one, you’ll have to change the above commands to point at the Skype.exe file on your computer.)
You can create a shortcut to make this easier. Open a File Explorer or Windows Explorer window and navigate to “C:\Program Files (x86)\Skype\Phone\” on a 64-bit version of Windows or “C:\Program Files\Skype\Phone\” on a 32-bit version. Right-click the Skype.exe file and select Send to > Desktop (create shortcut).
Go to your desktop, right-click the Skype shortcut you created, and select Properties. In the Target box, add /secondary to the end. For example, on a 64-bit version of Windows, it should look like:
Give the shortcut a name like “Skype (Second Account)”. You can keep double-clicking this shortcut to open additional instances of Skype.
Mac
Skype doesn’t offer a built-in way to do this on Mac OS X as it does on Windows. Common methods for doing this recomend you use the “sudo” command to run Skype as the root (administrator) account — don’t do that, it’s a very bad idea for security. You could create a secondary user account for each version of Skype you want to use, but there’s a better, cleaner option that makes each Skype program run under your same user account.
Rather than creating a new user account for Skype, you can run additional copies of Skype on your same user account and point each of them at a different data folder. Launch a Terminal and run the following command:
To sign into a third copy of Skype, replace “Skype2” with “Skype3” and run the command again. Repeat this process as many times as you need to. Thanks to Matthew Scharley on Super User for this trick.
Linux
Skype also offers a “secondary” option on Linux. To open another Skype instance, launch a terminal (or press Alt+F2 to access your desktop’s run dialog), and run either of the following commands:
Run the command again to open even more Skype instances. As on Windows and Mac, you can sign into each Skype window with a separate user account.
skype –secondary
To do this on an iPhone, iPad, or Android device, you’ll need to sign out of one account in Skype before signing into another. There’s no way to run multiple Skype apps at a time on Android or iOS.
