After many years using LastPass, I decided to make the switch to 1Password. I’m going to describe here why I did this and how was my process to choose.

LastPass

I’m using LastPass for many years now. A lot of people say that LastPass is not a good password manager, it has bugs, it’s ugly, it has too many trackers, yada, yada, yada.

I was always the guy who said: “Yeah, it works for me”. I was aware of the problems of LastPass but I was OK with the what the product was giving me without asking any money in return.

Although LastPass works for me, there were some annoying bugs. The fact that the Android app usually don’t fill users and passwords is really annoying. It’s basically useless on Android for me. I keep the app there so I can open it and do the copy & paste myself.

I have nothing to complain about the browser extensions, it usually works as I expect. It fills in passwords and save new ones when I subscribe to other services. That’s it. 🤷

LastPass’ UI is really weird indeed. It’s hard to find where to do stuff because there’s a lot of clutter everywhere. When you get used to it, things work as expected.

The move

In the beginning of 2021, I started to consider paying for a password manager and having a family subscription. I wanted to share some accounts with my wife and parents. Some accounts are not very personal:

  • Supermarket account to buy groceries
  • Pharmacy account
  • Other accounts related to my babies
  • Streaming accounts with multiple profiles and family subscriptions (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, etc).

I was also looking for a place to start exercising what I call my “Death plan”: “If I die, what is going to happen?”. The password manager shared with my family is a great start.

The research

I didn’t do much research for this. I had some ideas of what I could use and meet my criteria:

  • LastPass
  • Bitwarden
  • 1Password

LastPass

I’m already used to it, but I’m not sure if I want to use their paid versions and I’m a bit skeptical about their choices as a product.

If I’m going to move to a different idea, I will probably choose a different product.

Bitwarden

I already use Bitwarden at work and it works fine. There’s not much I have to complain there. Some bullet points:

  • The interface is OK-ish.
  • It’s open source.
  • I’m already used to it because I’m using their business plan.
  • The price is OK.

I decided to do some research to find out how it’s going to be to use them via business and personal and found out they don’t support it just yet, which is a no-go to me.

1Password

A lot of friends already use it for many years. It’s a solid product. I had some prejudice against them because it was a Apple thing, but now that they are available everywhere, it’s worth trying.

I did their trial and the product is indeed good as people mentioned. Their online vault is not very user-friendly IMO. It took me some time to understand how to add and edit stuff. I believe it is related to that “Apple thing” feeling I always had.

It seems to be the best password manager I can find until now.

The choice

I just subscribed to 1Password now and I’m enjoying it. ~I’m a top 1% Todoist user and I have a 25% discount on 1Password because of that (for new users only)~ (I actually got a 50% discount becaues of the family membership), which is a big win.

Here is a list of things I like about 1Password:

  • The way to create vaults and share
  • Share passwords with your family is very simple
  • The Android app actually works to fill in passwords (take that LastPass)

I hope it will be a long relationship so I will not have to migrate passwords again. 😅

The migration

The migration was quite simple. I went to LastPass, exported all my passwords as a CSV and imported all of them in 1Password. That’s it! :)

I found some encoding problem in some security notes because of words like “Anotação”, but other than that, everything worked seamlessly. If you’re coming from LastPass, there’s a good chance you will face no problems with the migration.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a password manager and you are willing to pay for a good service, 1Password seems to be a very strong canditate. I really recommend it.