1Password
The polished, paid password manager that gets out of the way once it's set up.
TL;DR verdict
If you can absorb the subscription, 1Password is still the calmest daily-driver vault on the market. The interface has aged well, the platform coverage is unusually complete, and Secret Key gives it a security posture the free tools can't quite match.
What we like
- Best-in-class UX across every platform we tested
- Secret Key model means a leaked master password alone isn't enough
- Watchtower's breach and reuse alerts are actually useful
- Passkey support is the cleanest of any manager we've tried
Where it falls short
- Not free, and no permanent free tier
- Subscription-only; the old standalone licence is long gone
- Closed source, so you're trusting AgileBits' audits rather than the world's
1Password has been the default recommendation for people who will happily pay for good software for about a decade now, and nothing in this year's version challenges that. It is the vault that feels the least like a vault.
What it does well
The interface is the pitch. Every client, on every platform, looks like it was designed by people who use it themselves. Search is fast, filters are sensible, and the mental model of vaults inside accounts scales from one person to a family to a small company without any of the awkward re-organising that other tools force on you.
Passkey handling is where 1Password has quietly pulled ahead. Saving a passkey to the vault is a single click, and using it from a different device is straightforward in a way that the platform keychains still aren't. If you are trying to move a household off passwords and onto passkeys without a support ticket every week, this is currently the best tool for the job.
The Secret Key is the underappreciated part of the security story. Your vault is encrypted with a combination of your master password and a 128-bit key that lives on your devices and is never sent to AgileBits. A server breach doesn't give an attacker enough to brute-force your vault the way a stolen master password alone might in other systems. It also means account recovery is genuinely impossible if you lose both, which is a feature and a liability depending on how organised you are.
Watchtower, the built-in monitoring layer, catches reused passwords, breached accounts, and sites that now support 2FA you haven't enabled. It's the one dashboard we look at more than once a month.
Where it disappoints
The price. There is no free tier and no one-time purchase, and the subscription creeps up over time in line with everyone else's. If you're setting a vault up for a parent or a friend who "just wants passwords to work," Bitwarden's free tier is a fairer conversation.
The move to a subscription and to a cloud-hosted vault also means the local-only vault that long-time users remember is gone. For most people this is fine. For a small minority with specific threat models, it's a dealbreaker.
Who it's for
Households that will use it every day and don't want to think about it. Journalists who need clean sharing between an editor and a source. Small teams that have outgrown a shared spreadsheet and don't want to run their own infrastructure. If you already pay for it, there's no reason to switch. If you don't, this is the version worth trying before you commit.
Frequently asked
Is 1Password worth paying for when Bitwarden is free?
For a lot of people, no. If you find yourself avoiding your vault because the UI annoys you, then yes. The productivity difference over a year is real.
What happens if I forget my master password?
Without both the master password and the Secret Key, nobody, including AgileBits, can recover your vault. This is the point. Print the Emergency Kit and store it somewhere safe before you need it.
Does 1Password support passkeys properly?
Yes. You can save passkeys to your vault and use them across devices, which is more than most first-party OS keychains can do cleanly today.