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Notes && Anecdotes
Photo by @tengyart on UnsplashPhoto by @tengyart on Unsplash

1Password vs LastPass for teams

security1passwordLastPass

Unless you have got special needs, choose 1Password as your team password manager. It just works, bug free – and their users love them.


Intro

At work, we’re in a situation where we want a password manager for ~70 people. Previously, we’ve set up Passbolt Community, which has worked great for tech. And it’s free! However, it’s not quite polished enough to be adopted by everyone – there’s no mobile app, and the vibe over it that scares away every other non-technical person.

In this review, we considered 1Password Team, 1Password Business, LastPass Team, LastPass Enterprise, LastPass Identity.

Passbolt Cloud is not included, though it was considered but quickly disgarded.

Summary

1Password and LastPass are both good options to gain practical and secure control over your passwords. Their prices ranges from ~3.5EUR to 7.5EUR a month per user, depending on what features you need. 1Password is a tad cheaper, while LastPass has some extra advanced features.

1Password stands out in user friendliness, and support. The reviews from users that have tried both, unanimously prefer 1Password.

Skip LastPass. It’s easily the worst major pw manager out there

Long time LP premium, then Families user. Android autofill has always been spotty, at best. Installed the trial 1P then upgraded to the Family plan. Everything that I have done, whether I had to dig to figure it out (my brain is slower than normal these days) or it was intuitive, EVERY SINGLE THING WORKS BETTER FOR ME NOW.

I used LastPass for a few years, originally paid for it back when you had to for mobile sync and then stopped paying for it when they added it to the free plan. I left LastPass a little over a year ago for 1Password and have never looked back.

I did not find anyone recommending LastPass over 1Password, which aligns well with my personal experience (I’ve tried my best to stay unbiased.)

Criterias

Price

Price obviously matters. 5EUR per user per month, quickly becomes several thousand euros per year.

Does it have a mobile application?

We need passwords while we’re outside of the office, not necessarily near a computer. All candidates had this, so it’s excluded in the summaries below.

User friendliness

UX is very important for security. Many people are relaxed when it comes to passwords. If it’s easier to put a note with the password next to your screen, many will. We’ll consider

  • App ratings: what ratings are given to the apps in the App store / Play store
  • Biometric login: Can we use our fingerprint instead of an long password?
  • Forum reviews: What are people saying online

Offboarding a user

Can a super-admin role easily add and remove a user from the system?

Are we warned of breaches?

If Dropbox has a breach, will our password manager know and warn us about that for our Dropbox password?

Auditing

Can we audit who has done what? Especially: who used that password at a given hour or day if something goes wrong.

Can we have federated login / provision users?

Could we automatically invite and remove users based on who got an email in our Gsuite?

Can we give groups access to “folders” of passwords?

All candidates had the ability to create “password folders”, which one could manually invite certain users to. But in a large organization, this can become a bit of a hassle: for each on- and offboarding, we would have to add them to every single “password folder” they belong to.

Is there a way to add new users to group X, and give group X access to folders A, B and C?

Candidates

1Password Team

1Password Business

Lastpass Teams

Biometric login info is hard to find. Their pricing info puts “Adaptive biometric authentication” at Identity package only (or MFA addon) .

Lastpass Enterprise

Biometric login info is hard to find. Their pricing info puts “Adaptive biometric authentication” at Identity package only (or MFA addon) .

Lastpass Identity