1Password Business

1Password is a solid password manager that's available pretty much everywhere. It's been my manager of choice for quite a while after my last job covered licenses for the whole company. In addition to passwords, it also manages identities and payment methods, which makes filling forms out a breeze.

Since leaving that job, I went ahead and sprung for the individual license. Things have been fine up until recently, with their push to 1Password 7. They are clearly trying to move lifetime licensees to a monthly subscription, and it's breaking the software for me in critical ways.

Despite having a license, the Chrome extension still only runs in "read-only mode" i.e. completed nerfed password tool. Recent updates has made this significantly worse than other password managers on the market. I would have given up long ago had I not already paid for it.

Here's an example: Want to create a 1Password account on desktop to sync and save passwords? First sign in on web! Oh, you'll need an account to sign in. Don't have an account? View this FAQ. The FAQ says, enter your secret key. Oh, the Mac version doesn't have a secret key? Looks like you have the wrong version! You need the membership, which costs a monthly fee. And, surprise, now your extension is in read only mode, hope you don't mind we took that away.

I don't know if it's their weird decision to fork the Mac app store version from 1Password 6/7 (a move done to extract more money from monthly subscriptions, I'm sure), how they are handling the vault syncing with external services or WHAT, but this once solid tool is growing stale, fast.

1password makes it as easy as possible to keep track of the passwords I use personally and those I share with my family and colleagues at work. Integrating with any website is inherently difficult but I think they do pretty well, and they're always coming out with improvements.

It's a bit confusing at times because the process of signing up for every website is different, but I don't think you can really blame 1password for that - in moments of ambiguity they sometimes create duplicate entries, and it's up to the user to cull these entries. I think that's the right strategy, it's better to not lose data, but it can definitely be a bit confusing at times - I convinced my mother-in-law to use this software but it was a bit too much for her to continue with, she now uses bad passwords and tapes post-it notes with her passwords to her screen 😬