The first dedicated password manager I ever owned was RoboForm. It was great in the early days, but nowadays there are much better solutions.
A few years ago I reviewed the available options and landed on Lastpass as my password manager of choice. And that was good for a while… until Lastpass just degenerated into a super cumbersome piece of s#it software.
Believe me, switching password managers is the kind of task I’d prefer to avoid. Not as bad as a root canal treatment, but just like a root canal treatment, I’d have to experience a lot of pain before undertaking the switch from one password manager to another.
(Also, spoiler alert: migrating from Lastpass to 1Password was not nearly as painful as I imagined. Pretty much a 15 minute task for most people, unless you have some superfunky special Lastpass setup.)
Some of the main things that annoyed me about Lastpass were:
- it wouldn’t recognize many login-pages, so you had to click on lastpass, manually find the right login, and then copy + paste the username and password into the relevant fields
- the mobile app was very buggy (iOS)
- I would oftentimes had to re-log in to Lastpass for Lastpass to activate filling in a form, even when just 1 or 2 minutes had passed (Chrome extension on OSX)
- Lastpass admin interface is a pain
- Password sharing was a mess. Oftentimes invites wouldn’t work properly. (In my account, there would be an outstanding invite, but in another person’s account, it wouldn’t show. And vice versa. Sometimes logins that were listed as “accepted” in my account wouldn’t show in the other person’s shared logins, and vice versa.)
Now the switch to 1Password was something I postponed for a long time, mostly because the one time I had used 1Password, I found the app to lack clarity and be somewhat confusing.
But now I realize that this was solely because I had become so used to Lastpass (I’ve been a premium customer for 4 years), that anything with a very different UI would require some familiarization at first.
In terms of feature-to-feature comparison, I think both apps are pretty much on par. There’s nothing I could (and wanted to) do in Lastpass that I can’t in 1Password, and vice versa.
For a more extensive and in-depth comparison, check out this Lastpass vs 1Password comparison by the Zapier team. (They arrived at a different conclusion, and if it weren’t for my repeated struggles with making Lastpass work robustly and fast, I’d agree with them.)