1Password...to Rule Them All
Overall Satisfaction with 1Password
1Password is used by some of our staff in our department, in a hybrid manner -- being used for both business and personal account credentials management. As applies to our business use cases, 1Password helps staff to ensure they use the strongest possible passwords across the many dozens of servers, service accounts, and web applications we rely on to deliver value to our university, without duplication of credentials. Because 1Password securely stores our information and allows us to retrieve it effortlessly, this tool helps our department maintain very high standards of security.
Pros
- 1Password works very well across all popular platforms, including desktop and mobile apps, as well as various web browser integrations, providing a convenient and consistent method to access your logins and passwords no matter what device you're currently using.
- 1Password provides a powerful, yet straightforward, mechanism for the creation of strong passwords of varying lengths and criteria: if you normally use 24-character passwords but your latest account can only support 16-character lengths, just tweak the password length slider. If your latest account forces you to use special characters, just toggle the checkbox to ensure that need is met.
- 1Password supports Apple Touch ID on iOS and MacOS, and Face ID on iOS, allowing authorized users secure, but easy, access to their credentials, and obviating the need for frequent typing out of long passphrases.
- 1Password continues to provide iterative updates to their products which ensure ever-improving auto-fill integrations with website logins and mobile app logins.
Cons
- Not every website or web app login page is automatically recognized by 1Password; because the product works so well in most use cases, it can be jarring when it fails to properly populate a form.
- Because 1Password provides so many ways to interact with your secure vault of credentials, the slight differences in the various interfaces can sometimes be confusing -- the desktop version is slightly different from the web browser extension version, for example, and occasionally I find myself searching for the "generate password" button in the desktop interface because it's not where I expect it to be, given its placement in the browser extension version.
- Sometimes 1Password is too eager to assist me; from time to time it has tried to autosave unnecessary form inputs as new login accounts. However, this is preferable to its "missing" new accounts upon their creation!
- 1Password has empowered me to meet the stringent security demands of my organization without having to resort to complex, time-intensive encryption setups to store all of my various credentials. Instead of wasting time on building, configuring, and maintaining such infrastructure, 1Password manages it for me.
- 1Password's annual subscription pricing model is reasonable, given a great deal of value, it has provided me, both personally and in my business operations. I don't need to invest capital into secure storage infrastructure to ensure that I always have my credentials at my fingertips, and I prefer to have a dedicated, focused security company own the hardware behind this great service.
- The fact that I control my 1Password account means that I can get double the use out of it: personal and professional account credentials sit side-by-side in my secure vault. Because I do not need to rely on my internal IT department to provide access, I am confident in storing whatever I need to store.
A chief marketplace competitor to 1Password is LastPass. While it is highly regarded and includes some features that 1Password currently doesn't (such as secure sharing), it fell victim to a substantial security breach in 2015, which has made me loathe to reconsider it.
Another well-known password manager is Dashlane, which also provides secure sharing, but falls short of 1Password in that it does not provide application password management.
1Password is continuously being improved, and the price I pay annually for a family account is more than fair.
Another well-known password manager is Dashlane, which also provides secure sharing, but falls short of 1Password in that it does not provide application password management.
1Password is continuously being improved, and the price I pay annually for a family account is more than fair.
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