The Top 4 Password Managers Reviewed
If you’re one of those peoples that has a lot of social media accounts, lots of email accounts, lots of website password and such, then a password manager is exactly what you need. However, it seems like a new option is coming out every day and so it is becoming harder and harder to find the best choice and more importantly, the right choice for you.
Therefore, we’ve decided to compile a list of the top 5 password managers out there right now so you can get a good grasp of the best options to you. We’ve picked out what we believe to be the 4 best password managers, giving you slightly different setups and capabilities, but all attempting to do a similar thing. They all offer high levels of security, some offer the ability to synchronise across multiple devices and more features. So here are our top 4 password managers reviewed.
Dashlane
Dashlane is one of the newer offerings in the Password Manager space. It has come into a busy crowd with some bigger names and offered a great service that will allow you to securely save your passwords and then access them when you’d like. Dashlane highlights itself on having the easiest-to-use and best-looking interface on all its respective and used platforms.
Dashlane’s highlight features are easy auto-login, simple security set up, form auto-fill, the ability to share passwords to pre-specified emergency contacts if needed, change multiple website passwords with a few clicks and logging of purchases made through the internet.
Dashlane’s pricing is simple. You can either have the application on one of your devices for free and this works well, allowing you all these features on that single device. But to get what you really want, which is the ability to synchronise all your passwords across all your devices, you’ll pay the $40/yr for Dashlane Premium.
1Password
1Password is one of the more popular offerings, especially within America. It offers a powerful password manager, a digital wallet feature and more that make it a great option. It also offers some great compatibility with mobile devices, aiming for the younger market and the business users who are required to travel with smartphones.
1Password’s main features are a password generator, a digital wallet for bank accounts and payment information, local saving option as opposed to synchronising across the web, offers a wide set of applications across different platforms including Windows, Android, iOS, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera and OSX.
1Password’s pricing options are even more simple than Dashlane’s. 1Password is a free application by default which allows you to save your passwords on one device and that’s all great. However, if you want the additional feature of synchronising across all your devices, there’s a one-time fee (not annual) of $50 (or $70 for Mac and Windows bundle).
LastPass
LastPass is arguably the king of password managers right now offering the first full-rounded password manager and gaining a huge audience as a result of that. LastPass offers up one of the most robust, simplest and full-featured experiences you’ll get in any password manager to date.
Some of LastPass’ key feature highlights are: easy to audit passwords, use stronger passwords, credit monitoring, secure password and document storage (and sharing, notifications when a site you use has been hacked, form auto-filling and many more features. LastPass also has applications for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Safari, Chrome, FireFox, Blackberry, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer. *And breathe*
Now, you may think with such a big feature set and reliability that you’d be expecting to pay a real premium for such a service. LastPass is free first (as we’ve seen with all these password managers to far), but if you want all the great features and cross-platform synchronisation, LastPass Premium is only $12/yr. Incredible price for an incredible Password Manager experience.
KeePass
Now, KeePass may not have the most attractive looking UI, in fact, it has by far the ugliest. But it offers some great password management options and is also free too. Your passwords in KeePass are saved onto an encrypted folder on your own system and are never uploaded anywhere else, offering the highest level of security among any of these applications so far.
KeePass’ main other offerings are: offline access, strong encryption, ability to login to any password dialogue on your system (instead of just online services), ability to synchronise across multiple devices via DropBox or KeePass’ own servers, open-source making it highly available to public.
KeePass has no pricing options here, it is free. Simple as that. KeePass, as aforementioned, is an open-source project meaning it offers applications on whatever platform you can think of, but most aren’t official, but that often doesn’t matter. Free, high level of security and some great features the other big names offer make this ugly user interface a worthy contender.