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Get Organized: Why Aren't You Using a Password Manager Yet?

Want to keep your online accounts safer, and be quicker at all your Web activities? You need a password manager—and many of them are free. Here are some tips for getting started.

By Jill Duffy
July 21, 2014
Get Organized: Getting Started With a Password Manager

Ever since I really understood what password managers are all about, it's become my mission to convince everyone I know to use one. I'm not kidding. I feel very strongly about password managers.

If you don't use one, you should. Let me tell you why—and start with the disclaimer that many of them are free. I'll also give you some tips for getting up and rolling with a password manager in an efficient way.

Get Organized Benefits of Using a Password Manager
There are so many advantages to using a password manager, but let me point to three.

First, password managers save you from having to remember your passwords. When you try to remember your passwords, you end up using some of the worst passwords imaginable. Don't do that. 

Second, because you don't have to remember your passwords, it's possible to have strong, unique passwords for every single one of your online accounts. My colleague Eric Griffith has some tips on how to create strong, unique passwords. Emmanuel Schalit, CEO of the password manager company Dashlane, defines a strong password as one that has "a minimum of eight characters, and contains upper and lower-case letters, numbers, and symbols." Good thing with a password manager, you only have to create a password once (the master password that unlocks the password manager itself). After that, the password manager can generate all your other passwords for you, taking strength into account.

Third, password managers fill in your usernames and password automatically when you go to your account websites, which means you waste less time typing them. If you are a heavy Internet user, those seconds add up to big time savings. In some jobs (social media managers, for example, or people who test software and online services, such as yours truly) it's possible to have hundreds of logins, in which case a password manager is absolutely essential for the time savings alone.

 

 

Getting Started
Most password managers are small applications that you install on your computers. (I'll name some of our favorite password managers here at PCMag in the next section.) I say computers, plural, because most of them sync your passwords across multiple machines, which is essential. If you set up a new online account on your work computer, you want to have those same credentials at your disposal when you get home. And bonus points if you can get them on all your mobile devices as well. Sometimes syncing is considered a premium feature and won't be in the free version of a password manager, but not always.

With a password manager, you only have to remember one password, which means you can afford to make it a good one. The password manager will walk you through this process. It might also have some requirements for your one password to make sure it's safe and hard to guess.

Once the application is installed and has access to your Web browsers, you can go about your business. When you land on a site and try to login, the password manager will offer to do it for—if it has your account details, that is. If it doesn't yet know your username and password for a particular site, it will capture them as you type them, and then encrypt them and save them for next time.

Some password managers come with other features, too, such as the ability to fill in your credit card details when you shop online. If a safe and secure password manager fills in your checkout forms for you, keystroke loggers won't be able to swipe your credit card number. And as with logging into sites in general, it's way faster.

Another bit of personal information that password managers sometimes offer to store for you, digitally yet safely, is your passport or other national documents (such as a social security number). These are the kinds of information you may one day need accessible to you—like if you lose your passport while traveling abroad, and the embassy needs to know your details—and that are better kept in a password manager than, say, a general-purpose cloud storage and syncing service.

The Best Password Managers
We've already rounded up our list of the best password managers, which I encourage you to read. But here, I'll summarize three favorites: LastPass, Dashlane, and Roboform Everywhere. They're all excellent, but have some differentiation, so you want to be sure you choose the one that best fits your needs.

Our Editors' Choice is LastPass. There's a free version of LastPass, which does hold our Editors' Choice distinction among free password managers, but you can also upgrade to LastPass Premium, which costs a nominal $1 per month. The big difference between free and Premium comes down to the features you can get out of the LastPass mobile apps, but read the full reviews of the two versions (via the links above) for more details.

With LastPass, your usernames and passwords (and everything else you put into the account) is encrypted and stored online. When your login details are synced to your computers and mobile devices, they're also encrypted during that delivery. When the data is at rest, it's encrypted in such a way that even the folks at LastPass can't see it, which means the company is literally unable to hand over your passwords to the NSA or anyone else.

Part of what we love about both the free and Premium versions of LastPass is that they can protect your data with more different kinds of two-factor authentication than any other password manager we've tested at PCMag. That's saying a lot. As Neil Rubenking, security expert at PCMag, put it, "When you enable multifactor authentication, a hacker who guesses or steals your master password won't be able to log in."

LastpassIf you share passwords with other people, for household accounts for example, LastPass (and some other password managers) has a feature that lets you share them securely, and you can hide the password itself from being visible to the other person. So LastPass will allow that person to log in, but not actually see or know the password.

Dashlane is another high-scoring password manager that we at PCMag like. (It's the one I use.) It also comes in both free and Premium edition ($29.99 per year), with the free Dashlane limited to being installed on only one device. In a pinch, you can log into a website version of Dashlane to copy and paste or visually reveal your passwords (which you can only do one at a time), but that's just not nearly as convenient as having a password manager installed right on all your devices. Remember that benefit I mentioned earlier about saving time by not typing your passwords?

DashlaneDashlane has some neat features related to Internet shopping. It can auto-fill your credit card information so you don't have to type it and risk having your keystrokes logged, and it takes screencaptures invisibly while you're checking out so that if something goes wrong, you have evidence of all the pages you saw. Let's say you buy something online and never receive an email confirmation with a confirmation number. Dashlane will have a screenshot of the confirmation page.

Roboform Everywhere (free; $19.95 per year for "Everywhere" license) is another solid choice. I've already mentioned that a lot of password managers will fill in credit card details for you, but RoboForm takes the same concept a little further by filling in all kinds of online forms on your behalf, hence, the "form" in its name. It's a more common feature you'll find in other password managers nowadays, but Roboform got on the bus early.

Three Tips
The day you download your password manager, I recommend taking a few steps.

1. Jot down your password—or better, write down clues to your password that only you understand—and put it in a safe place, like on a scrap of paper and into your nightstand. If you ever forget your password manager's password, you're a little bit stuck and will have to do password resets on all your accounts.

2. Set aside five or ten minutes to get some of your most important passwords into the manager. Password managers will pick up your passwords as you use it, but I recommend going to all the online accounts that you use regularly (Web mail, social media, financial accounts, phone service provider) and letting the password manager capture them now. Part of the reason is to just get that information into the manager, but it will also give you a few moments to get used to the password manager itself. You'll start understanding the icons and feedback it provides in action.

3. Down the road, you can use the password manager to help you clean up all your passwords, that is to say, change them to all be unique and strong. Many password managers show you the number of reused passwords you have, or how many are considered "weak" by the company's standards.

For more information on tightening up your online presence and passwords, read up on whether you're still using terrible passwords, and find out why some people believe that two-factor authentication trumps all (and why the jury is still out on the true safety of two-factor authentication, seeing as it's hasn't been foolproof to date).

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About Jill Duffy

Columnist and Deputy Managing Editor, Software

I've been contributing to PCMag since 2011 and am currently the deputy managing editor for the software team. My column, Get Organized, has been running on PCMag since 2012. It gives advice on how to manage all the devices, apps, digital photos, email, and other technology that can make you feel like you're going to have a panic attack.

My latest book is The Everything Guide to Remote Work, which goes into great detail about a subject that I've been covering as a writer and participating in personally since well before the COVID-19 pandemic.

I specialize in apps for productivity and collaboration, including project management software. I also test and analyze online learning services, particularly for learning languages.

Prior to working for PCMag, I was the managing editor of Game Developer magazine. I've also worked at the Association for Computing Machinery, The Examiner newspaper in San Francisco, and The American Institute of Physics. I was once profiled in an article in Vogue India alongside Marie Kondo.

Follow me on Mastodon.

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