Comparison
Three free ways to watch several web pages at once
Vivaldi, macOS window tiling and Plash all put more than one web page in front of you, and all three are free. This page is about what each one is genuinely good at, and the one job none of them do — the job SplitWeb was built for.
Vivaldi's tab tiling
Vivaldi is a complete free browser with tiling built in — no extension needed. It tiles tabs vertically, horizontally or in a grid, and recent versions go further than that: you can group large numbers of tabs into stacks and then tile the stacks.
Where it wins. It is free, it is cross-platform, and it is a real browser — extensions, bookmark sync, tab management, the lot. SplitWeb has none of those and is not trying to. If your requirement is "several pages on screen inside the browser I already use", Vivaldi is simply the better answer, and it costs nothing.
Where it stops. Tiling shows you whole pages. There is no way to keep one region of a page and discard the surrounding navigation, sidebars and ads.
macOS window tiling
Recent macOS releases tile windows into halves and quarters from the keyboard, with no third-party software at all. Anyone who suggests you don't need an app for this is partly right.
Where it wins. Free, built in, works with every app on your Mac rather than just web pages.
Where it stops. It tiles windows, not pages. Four tiled browser windows are four complete websites, chrome and all, and you cannot crop any of them. The arrangement is also transient: quit, restart, and you rebuild it by hand. SplitWeb saves the layout, the URL in each pane and the crop region for each pane, and restores all of it on launch.
Plash
Plash is free and open source. It puts a web page onto your desktop wallpaper, with an auto-reload interval and an adjustable opacity, and it lives in the menu bar.
Where it wins. For "keep one page permanently visible in the background" it is excellent, free, and lighter than anything else here.
Where it stops. The wallpaper layer is behind your windows, so the moment you are working, the page is hidden. It shows one site at a time rather than several tiled together, and it does not crop.
What about Arc?
Worth being blunt, because people still search for it: The Browser Company stopped developing Arc in 2025 and the company was acquired by Atlassian later that year. Arc now receives security patches only, and its successor, Dia, is a different product without the features most people liked Arc for.
That said, if you are looking for an Arc replacement you are most likely looking for tab management and Spaces. SplitWeb has neither — it is not a browser and does not want to be your browser. But if the part of Arc you actually miss is "several pages visible at once", that is the part SplitWeb takes further, by cropping each one to the region you watch.
The one thing none of them do
Every option above shows you complete pages. That is fine until you notice how much of each page you are not looking at: the number you actually watch might be a fifth of the window, and the rest is masthead, navigation, related links and a promo banner. Multiply that by six pages on one display and most of your screen is chrome.
SplitWeb's one distinct feature is cropping a pane to a region. You draw a box over the part you want, apply it, and the pane keeps only that region, scaled up to fill the space. It is still the real page rendering live — still fetching, still signed in — not a screenshot. And because the region is stored against the pane size it was drawn at, resizing the pane rescales the same region instead of drifting elsewhere on the page. How that works in detail.
Three things to know before you start
The app is free to download and runs fully unlocked for 14 days — no card, no sign-up — so the honest way to settle this is to put your own pages in it. After the trial it is $4.99 a month, $39.99 a year, or $79.99 once, on macOS 14 or later. Keep the free tools alongside it if they already do part of the job; nothing here asks you to replace your browser.