One of my clients asked if I could suggest something so they could keep their passwords in a more secure location. They wanted a cloud solution, so I looked at the alternatives LastPass and others. After doing some research 1Password was the best.
First I should note that I wrote an article about Passpack which is a password manager that competes with 1Password. At the time it was a great free option and still is. However, if you want to do more than just manage passwords there are extra features that make 1Password a better choice for most businesses. Passpack would be okay for the average Joe, and 1Password is better with teams of people.
There are some neat things about 1Password that I hadn’t realized were available. It lets you know if your passwords are compromised, audits the kind of passwords you have and even suggests if you should change your passwords. If you have passwords that are the same it lets you know this isn’t a good idea. For people who are not involved in IT, this is a good way to start learning about password management.
In a past company, I used Passpack because they were sensitive to cost. For the first 100 passwords, Passpack is free. This is less than the average person has, so it becomes a free service. However, if you like more control, then moving from Passpack to 1Password might be helpful for you. You can easily export to a .csv and you can import into 1Password from a .csv by pasting in a text box. To be honest, this didn’t work for me, but the table had issues so I assume it will probably work for you.
I am not getting a referral for this or money for this. As I have said before I don’t accept money for reviews and if I get an unrequested gift I disclose it in a review. They do have paid referral programs but I am not participating in that.
The other services like Lastpass I thought were overly complicated and less feature-filled. Even though Lastpass was free for a basic account, the interface was horrible. I didn’t like it and it had a less useful management screen. When you start 1Password you see important details on the management portal and it feels like it was meant to be used.
In the past, I personally didn’t see the purpose of this password management service. I thought that the average person should be able to memorize their passwords like I have. However I have seen that people really struggle with this, and I would recommend 1password in the future if someone says they struggle with passwords.
You can download a client for the OS you have and the Mac client works great. It is quite fun to click one button and log in to the webpage without any username/password fill-in. I don’t like using a browser for this because when there is a problem you tend to lose your passwords. I have used another password manager in a previous job called Keypass and that worked but it was local to the local system and not something that you could use outside of work. If I am at home, I can still access this information easily since it is cloud-based. So for me, this makes it more useful than Keypass.
I like it more than any other password management system I have used. Maybe you can find it useful too.