Best free password managers 2023: Online security doesn’t have to cost a thing

Like several other services, Bitwarden offers a free tier and a paid tier—but its free tier packs in so many features that most individuals won’t need more. You can access the service across an unlimited amount of devices and a multitude of device types, enable basic TOTP two-factor authentication, and fill your vault with as many passwords as you’d like. The free personal plan also allows privacy-minded users to avoid the company’s cloud hosting and instead self-host. And in recent months, Bitwarden has added security features that let you generate random user names and email aliases (via integration with email masking services) in addition to random passwords.

Rivals dole out far less to their free users, and it’s particularly rare for them to grant unrestricted movement between multiple device types. (LastPass and Dashlane begin charging as soon as you want to leave the confines of a single device.) Most competitors are also not open-source like Bitwarden, which prevents their communities from being able to hunt for hidden backdoors or security holes.

The free personal plan even now includes real-time password sharing with one other account—perfect for couples or people otherwise closely linked. This feature allows unlimited password sharing between the two users, thus allowing both individuals to safely access current passwords for shared accounts.

Bitwarden’s other advantage is that should your needs expand down the road, the transition to a paid plan won’t cost much. A premium personal plan is just $10 per year (compared to $36-plus per year for rivals), and a family plan is $40 per year for up to six users (compared to $48-plus per year for rivals). And moving up to a paid tier does come with concrete benefits: support for more sophisticated forms of two-factor authentication, evaluations of your passwords’ health (e.g., strength, public exposure, etc.), encrypted file storage, and emergency access for trusted individuals.

Finally, if you decide to move elsewhere one day, Bitwarden allows you to export your passwords—with the option to do so as an encrypted file. But with such a generous and thorough set of features, you’ll likely not want to go elsewhere.

KeePass may not look like much, as our review points out, but under the hood this desktop-application-based password manager has all the features the privacy- and security-minded could want, provided you don’t mind rolling up your sleeves a bit.

You return full control over who accesses your password vault—the program and its encrypted database file(s) are stored locally on your computer by default, unlike a cloud service, where you have to trust that servers are set up correctly and that the employees are trustworthy. Moreover, you don’t even have to install it on your system, but can run it via a portable .exe application kept on a USB stick.

KeePass is also an open-source program, which means that the community can always vet it for any hidden backdoors or just plain old security-crippling bugs. And you can enable two-factor authentication through the use of key files (which augments your master password), plus lock the database file to the Windows account that created it, too.

You’re not restricted to a Windows desktop system, either—because the program is open source, you can find community-created ports of KeePass for MacOS, Linux, Android, and iOS, as well as a boatload of plugins that let you customize it to your taste. With plugins, you can re-create most of the features you’d find in paid cloud-based services, like checking to see if any of your passwords have been found as part of a data dump.

You can also get creative with how you store your database file—for remote access, you can put it on a home server, or if you’re comfortable, a cloud service of your own choosing. (Perhaps you’re more comfortable with how Google safeguards its accounts than a dedicated password manager service, for example.) And should you ever decide to hang up your hat as a DIY password manager administrator, KeePass allows for easy exports of your passwords.

So an online password manager makes you nervous. Or you instead prefer to have 100 percent control over your passwords. You could use KeePass, but that program can be…a little intense.

A great middle ground is KeePassXC, a streamlined alternative of the official KeePass app. It boasts a more modern interface, and is much more newbie-friendly. It also has a few features you’d expect from an online manager, like a browser extension.

Despite its simplified interface, you’ll still find many of KeePass’s best attributes in KeePassXC. It’s equally open source and free, for starters. Its file format is also the same as KeePass (and generally visa versa), so switching between the two programs is easy. You can download it for Windows, Linux, or macOS as well. And the app stores its encrypted database files on your device by default, so you have full control over your passwords. You can keep them offline, or upload to the cloud if you wish.

Using KeePassXC is a cinch. It’s hard to get overwhelmed by it—you can only create one type of entry in a database: Just logins, and you only get five fields to fill out within each entry. Set up of two-factor TOTP tokens, attaching files, and adding custom text fields is also supported, but that’s it. And unlike the official KeePass app, KeePassXC doesn’t support plugins.

You will still need to apply a little elbow grease to get the most of this app—for example, password sharing isn’t enabled out of the box. But good documentation makes light work of configuring the app. Generally, with KeePassXC, what you see is what you get, and that’s exactly the appeal of this offline password manager. Even leaving it (by exporting all your passwords) is an easily found option in the menu.