1Password

Disclaimer

I think my needs within the context of 1Password's service offerings are pretty basic, so this is meant to be a log of my experience with what I have used as opposed to a full-on deep dive review of every feature and service offering. I feel that most people will probably have needs similar to mine so I hope this helps.

The Features and Services I Use On 1Password (In no particular order)

• Password Sharing

  • Via shared vault

• Families

• Auto-fill

• Mobile app

  • Android

• Desktop apps

  • Windows

  • Arch Linux via AUR

• Browser Extensions

  • Google Chrome

  • Firefox

  • Brave Browser

• Multi Factor Authentication

  • One-Time Passwords (OTPs)

  • Security Questions and Answers

• Passkeys

• Profile

• Watchtower

• Collections

• Tags

• Password generator

Quick Summary of Good Features

The apps are polished and intuitive. From my experience, the features "just work" without much setup. Storing passkeys is useful because it allows you to share them between devices easily. Adding users to your family is easy and managing vault access is fairly intuitive as well. When your vault detects a login for a website that has Multi Factor Authentication capabilities or allows the use of Passkeys and you don't have either stored with the login, it will prompt you to set it up. Sometimes even offering direct links to do so.

History

As a tech enthusiast, I am no stranger to the herculean task of password management. I have been the designated "computer person" in my family since we got our first computer in the late 90's. Granted that title was not really earned back then, it just fell to me because I spent the most time on it. Usually playing games. As I got older I did learn a thing or two about how they work, so maybe it did eventually become earned, but I digress.

My First Password Manager

My first encounter with a password manager was in the early 2010's. I had just graduated university and started working for a small local IT firm. It was there that I learned why you should use unique, complex passwords for all of your accounts. We had several clients that had been hacked because they used the same, simple password for everything. Although I couldn't always help them recover what was lost, I wanted to help them prevent it from happening again. I looked at a variety of solutions to this problem and eventually settled on LastPass. It was fairly easy to use, and free if you were only using it on one device, which was much more common at the time.

Years went by and many things changed: My job. My home. Even my relationship status. But I was still content with LastPass. Until the early 2020's when they had a string of hacks. Thankfully, none of my data was compromised. Though it was enough to make me start questioning their security practices. One day my coworkers, some of whom are much more adept and knowledgeable about technology than myself, were talking about LastPass and how it keeps getting hacked. It was enough to convince me to leave comfort and the status-quo behind for something new. They talked about another product called Bitwarden as a good alternative, so I decided to give it a go.

Bitwarden's software is open-source so I felt way more confident about its security because anyone can look at the code and see for themselves. That's pretty good incentive to ensure that you are keeping your customers' data as secure as possible. Another benefit to Bitwarden is that only certain features require a paid account. I kept my LastPass account active while I switched everything to Bitwarden so I could see if it would meet my needs. I used Bitwarden exclusively for a month and it worked great. I did have to upgrade to a paid account (which was less than $20 CAD per year at the time) to ensure that I had all of the features I needed, but that was a fair bit less than I was paying for LastPass. This concluded my Bitwarden experiment.

My Second Password Manager

In 2023 I deleted my LastPass account and used Bitwarden exclusively. I wanted to get my wife on a password manager as well so I tried to get her set up with Bitwarden. I shared the passwords she needed access to and set it up on her phone and her computer. This didn't work as I had hoped. She didn't like it at all. Although, to be fair, she hardly ever used her computer and the Android application didn't work well on her phone for some reason. Thankfully, she hardly ever needed access to the passwords I had shared because we're usually together. In 2024, my employer adopted 1Password as its official password manager.

All employees were expected to use 1Password to manage their work-related passwords on work-issued devices. I was a little resistant to this because I was partial to Bitwarden and had hoped I could convince the company to consider it, but it really didn't take too long for 1Password to win me over. Before I knew it I was using it daily and really enjoying it. The interface is very intuitive and there are lots of options in terms of the types of data you can store and how to store it. Organizing your data is also pretty easy through the use of collections and tags. The browser extensions I've used have worked very well, although there are some kinks I'd like them to work out, but I'll touch on that later. Near the end of 2025 I learned that my employer's 1Password plan entitles all employees to a free Families plan for personal use.

My Third (And Hopefully Last) Password Manager

Suffice it to say that I switched right away. I set up personal accounts for my wife and I, imported all of our passwords from Bitwarden, and shared everything that I needed to. I did the same thing as I did with LastPass to ensure it would meet our needs before I deleted my Bitwarden account. So I lived with 1Password exclusively for a month and it worked brilliantly. So earlier this year I deleted my wife and I's Bitwarden accounts and I haven't looked back. My wife even uses 1Password on her own occasionally. Which says a lot. I couldn't pay her to use Bitwarden, so I was quite excited to see her using 1Password from time to time.

Although I will say that most of my experience so far with 1Password has been great, I did allude to a few kinks earlier that I'd like them to work out, so let's take a look at those now.

Some Kinks Are Just Wrong

First off, the browser extension has a habit of prompting you to save a password even when you've told it not to do so for that specific domain or website. Sometimes it will even do that if you haven't unlocked the extension. It can be very annoying.

Secondly, The Android app occasionally has issues with auto fill, although I have witnessed this issue in the Bitwarden Android app as well. The fact that multiple password manager apps have this issue definitely leads me to believe that there's a significantly complex problem here. One that no one has found a resolution for yet. Regardless, it can be very frustrating. Especially if you aren't tech savvy enough to work around it.

Lastly, this might just be me, but I have encountered at least one application that uses OTPs in a unique way. Typically, OTPs are entered in a separate field after you enter your password. This one application, however, appends the OTP to the password within the same field. It would be nice to see a customization option within 1Password that allows you to control how the OTP is entered. I have seen requests to the 1Password team in their forums about this. It seems like it would be simple enough to implement, but I don't know what their code looks like.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I would recommend 1Password. It's a great password manager. However, I would say that that depends on your needs and budget. It is a little on the pricier side, although it is very polished and intuitive compared to something like Bitwarden. I would say that if you need to share passwords with less tech savvy folks it may be worthwhile to fork over the extra cash for 1Password, but if you are looking for something for yourself or you're sharing with more technically-inclined individuals, you might want to save the money and go with Bitwarden.

• If you want more information on LastPass, check out my review

• If you want more information on Bitwarden, check out my review