You’re not sure why we’ve compiled a list of Best Password Managers in 2022? Don’t worry, let us break it down for you.

We are living in the time where you no more are allowed to use “123456” or “password” as your passwords anymore, being the most commonly used passwords on the web. You can’t use your partner’s name or their date of birth as your password either, it is no more considered to be secured.

Regardless of what we’re taught, we still somehow go for the passwords that are somewhat easier for us to remember. It makes sense right, we have to remember our passwords. How are we supposed to remember passwords with gigantic requirements of alphanumeric characters, even special characters? We’re no Sherlock with a mind palace. That is where Password Managers come to help, they do help you deal with the human factor and the password complexity, both with ease.

What are Password Managers

The best password managers that we consider, does a lot of work for you so you can focus on what’s important. By this we mean, it helps you generate a password that is as per the proven password complexity principles making it harder to crack. Not only it generates it, but helps you re-use it without actually having to remember it or note it down with your pen in a notebook you would keep under your pillow.

In short, we can conclude that these password managers to protect us from password-based attacks, but why is that important? We’ve seen a drastic rise in password-based attacks estimated of 921 attacks per second globally, making it a rise of 74% in just one year as reported by Microsoft in their Digital Defense Report 2022.

We as humans have limitations regarding remembering the amount of different passwords we can come up with, and that is why we often reuse the passwords on most of the websites we sign-up for. Imagine if one of those websites gets compromised, the same password can be used to access your account on other websites but the issue remains that how many possible websites could you remember to change your password from? We definitely needed a solution to this.

What are the Password Attacks?

The password attacks include brute-force attacks which is a type of attack that cracks your password through guessing. It isn’t just a random guess but it guesses from the most common passwords there are on the internet. You see why password complexity is important right? However the brute-force attack could be carried through a more personalized approach as well.

Attackers often attempt to make use of the leaked passwords online and use them against other platforms for the same users, and guess what? It often works. Most of the users use the exact same passwords anywhere they create an account.

Microsoft’s Digital Defense Report 2022 also mentions that 90% of the accounts that are compromised, they do not have a strong authentication. This simply means that they either use too simple passwords or they have no additional layer of security such as multifactor authentication.

We did post about why multifactor authentication has been becoming less effective, you can read about it here.

Password Managers overcome all of these problems for you, don’t they? You get a randomized generated password that follows an industry standard for their password complexity and you use it anywhere you want to without noting it down. Additionally now the password managers allow you to pass your passwords to your loved ones when you die, keeping the process simpler.

Why not using our Browser’s Password Manager

Most of the browsers have their primary password manager built into them by default. For example, Google Chrome asking or Mozilla Firefox asks you if you’d want to save password when you log-in anywhere. That apparently makes it seem better than just reusing the same password everywhere. The browsers now even generate a randomly unique password for you to use.

Security experts recommend using a dedicated password manager instead of the ones that browsers offer. That is because browsers have a lot of other functionalities that they have to focus on, not just the password management. Therefore, the dedicated password manager that you use would have a single goal: keeping your passwords safe and easy for you to use. This leads to better security as they will often get updates to get better at doing this for you.

Overall The Best Password Manager in 2022

1Password

1Password initially started with being the password solution for just the Apple devices, but it has now supports almost every other platform and device. Including Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android as the core platforms that it supports. 1Password now also supports web browser specifically including the Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox and Brave.

It’s time to talk about their features that sets them apart from others. In addition to managing your passwords, 1Password also offers the functionality to act as an authentication app like Google Authenticator. Moreover as an additional security layer, it creates a secret key for the encryption key that it uses to encrypt your passwords. This means that nobody can decrypt your passwords without using that secret key.

The other reason why we recommend 1Password as our #1 Best Password Manager is because of its perfect integration with other mobile apps. There is no need to copy and paste your login credentials on different apps now, its integrations works on autofill for you.

It also offers an interesting feature called “Travel mode“. Using this feature, the sensitive data is removed removed from your devices before you travel and is later restored back safely once you’ve crossed borders. The only vaults on your devices during the travel mode will be the ones you’ve marked as safe during travel. This prevents law enforcement agencies from accessing the complete password vault of yours during inspection at international borders.

1Password offers two different pricing plans: one priced for an individual and the other for family accounts. The prices are seen as very minimal as per the features they provide and keeping in mind the integrations that they already have. Moreover they offer a FREE Trial Account for 14 days!

The complete comparisons between the features of these two subscriptions and their cost break-down can be viewed on their website.

The Best Free Option

BitWarden

BitWarden is a famous open-source free password manager that includes almost all of the features and is as user-friendly as our overall best pick. It has been popular among the open-source advocates, as its source code is freely available online that powers BitWarden.

Due to it being open-source, the code is available for anyone to go seek flaws, vulnerabilities and to fix them. Hence, this makes it more secure as there are more eyes on the code. They also have been audited in 2020 by a third party to ensure it is secured.

BitWarden can be independently self-hosted. This means that it can be installed on your own server if you do prefer running your own cloud.

BitWarden has its app for all major platforms as Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS including extensions that work on all common web browsers as well. As an additional security layer, it has been integrated with Windows Hello and Touch-ID for its app on Windows and macOS.

It also offers fully automated and semi-automated autofill feature. If you visit a website for which you have saved login credentials for, it pop-ups showing number of saved accounts from which you can choose to log-in with. This allows you to easily switch between multiple accounts on the same website.

BitWarden’s free account consists of supporting unlimited passwords, unlimited devices, all of the core functions it has and stays free for the rest of the upcoming years as well. However there are additional features that can be availed using the paid subscriptions which are, in our opinion, really cheap.

The packages they offer are as Free, Premium(costs $10 annually) and for Families(costs $40 annually). Thinking about it from the pricing perspective, these features being offered at such low costs is actually amazing and impressive.

Password Manager in the Spotlight

Dashlane

Dashlane has been in the market for years, and for the starting years Dashlane seemed to be providing exactly the same features and services as every other password manager had to offer in the market. However, with their recent update in Dashlane 6, a lot of features are introduced which makes it super efficient and way ahead than other password managers. One of the best features it has introduced is “Site Breach Alerts” through which it actively monitors the darker side of the internet. It constantly looks for the leaked and stolen passwords, making comparisons and finally alerts you if it find out that your passwords have been compromised over the internet.

Dashlane also generates a secret key to encrypt your passwords with, making it impossible to decrypt without the use of that specific key the same way 1Password does. There are other features that Dashlane offers as well: a VPN service, and opting not to store your passwords on their server but instead you’ll have to sync them across your devices making you responsible of it.

The apps offered by Dashlane are cross-platform and user-friendly making it easy to use.

Dashlane offers several pricing packages: Free, Advanced(costs $2.75 per month when billed annually), Premium(costs $3.33 per month when billed annually), Friends & Family(costs $4.99 per month when billed annually).

The free subscription offers the basic features that every other password manager offers as well. It can be seen that the additional features that sets Dashlane apart from its competitors comes up with a price, but that still seems to be worth paying for.

Best Industry Follower

Keeper Password Manager

Keeper offers a lot of security products and their password manager is one of those products they’re offering in the cybersecurity space. Their password manager works pretty similar to the other password managers that we have talked above. It generates a secret key which gets used to decrypt your stored passwords in the password vault and the setting up procedure is quite similar as well.

Moreover, they also offer a similar feature as Dashlane’s “Security Breach Alert” which alerts its users when it finds your information to be compromised over the internet by actively monitoring the publicly posted data but they call it “Dark web monitoring”.

They offer two subscription packages for personal use: Personal(costs $35 annually) and Family (costs $75 annually). They include additional security layers with their paid subscription, they have fingerprint and Face-ID login integrated within their apps to make it securer for their users.

Summarizing Password Managers: Making it more secure

Password Managers only exist to assist you in the following ways:

• Generating a randomly unique password for you to use that is proven to be secure as per the modern password complexity

• Enabling you to access all those different passwords with just one password that you’ll have to remember. Although the single password required by you to remember has other alternatives that are offered such as Touch-ID logins etc but you still do have one password on which a lot of other information relies on in-terms of security. We advise you to really choose a stronger password for this and opt for the additional security layers if you can.
• The Password Manager being accessible: the solution that the password manager provides must be easily accessible to you, it could be in the form of a cross-platform app that supports all major platforms or a web-browser extension that supports all major web browsers.
• Form auto-filling feature must be disabled: A lot of password managers fill the forms with your login information automatically by themselves but you should disable it as recommended by security experts. The password managers have been previously vulnerable due to the auto-filling within the web-browser before.
• Actively monitoring compromised accounts: The password managers do keep your passwords really safe in an encrypted form, and also provides tons of other features to make use of them in the most secure way possible. However, if the website that you have created your password for, compromised, there’s nothing else you can do but immediately change your password.

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