If you have read my previous comparison post where we took all of the popular password managers head to head against each other, then you'll know that I kind of crowned 1Password and also BitTitan as the overall winners.
In this post I thought I'd go a little deeper into one in particular, which is 1Password Families. I'm really going to get into the guts of this offering and talk through the features, my likes and dislikes, and also finish off with a special discount if you just want that.
They haven't paid me to say any of these things - but very selfishly, 1. I genuinely quite like this product. and 2. My last video I made about this was by far one of my best performing on my YouTube channel. So if you are looking for what motive I have to make this post, that's basically it.
INTRO
If this is your first time here then Hi my name is Pete, and on this website you can find posts around tech, business, finance, basically anything I'm into. So if you're looking for more reviews like this then please subscribe!
1Password is one of many Family offerings when it comes to password managers - and getting straight into this I will say that personally, I found 1password to be one of the best out of all of those I tested last year. That includes LastPass, Keeper, Dashlane and a few others.
FAMILY SUBSCRIPTION
First up, what is the 1Password Families Subscription? Well it's basically just like a standard 1password subscription, but lets up to 5 people store and share their own passwords at just a fraction of what it would cost to have 5 separate personal subscriptions to 1Password.
Those 5 people don't even have to officially be from the same household, it could be friends, roommates or housemates. Perhaps, yes, family, but you'll be able to share logins with individuals or groups of individuals within that subscription.
If there are more than 5 of you then you can just add on additional users for a small cost per month. The way 1Password works with Families, is with Vaults.
So you have a Personal Vault, which stores your own passwords. You have a Shared Vault which is created by default when you sign up for a subscription, and by default everybody in your family will have access to passwords in these vaults.
But you can go and create any other vaults that you want to separate your data and share with only specific people, and you can move passwords between vaults effortlessly - super clean, easy, quick, no issues there.
DEVICE SUPPORT
When it comes to device support, it basically runs on everything. Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome, iPhone, Android, there are browser plugins for Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Microsoft Edge. But one thing that's tripped me up in the past is that there are kind of 2 kinds of browser plugins.
There is the 1Password Browser Extension, which you get in Safari, and there is 1Password X which works in all of the others. And you get tonnes more functionality in 1PasswordX - so my recommendation would be to go with anything but Safari when working on a Mac to get the best experience when browsing the web.
FEATURES
Some features I love about this, are that you can show passwords in large type. Which will pop up the password out of the password manager which floats on top of any other window AND it gives you the number of the character underneath. You know those times you're on the phone to someone and they ask for characters 3 and 7 from your password? Well this makes it super easy to quickly pick out character 3 and 7, or whatever and I absolutely love this, it's not something I come across with many, maybe any, other password apps.
You also get 1Gb of encrypted storage for documents, which again you can share - but to be honest I don't use this, as I choose to share my documents from my own Google and Microsoft cloud subscriptions. This storage is geared more towards say, I dunno, if you wanted to store a copy of your passport or driving license perhaps within your password manager? Maybe bank, finance or investment paperwork?
You can use 1Password as the 2FA Generator for those websites that need 2FA access, and with the 1Password families subscription you can also share that 2FA access! But it makes it really quick and easy to log in to a website even with 2FA without having to pull out your phone or open another App to generate the code.
Then in terms of the data you can store in 1Password, you can store Payments and card details, much like Safari does when using a Mac or iPhone - But because 1Password sits outside of Safari, this means you can easily get to the 1Password App if you forget your card pin, and it will auto-fill card details in other browsers too.
Lastly in features, you can also save, pretty much any data that you want in 1Password - which again, I love. Custom fields are just a case of hitting Edit and then typing the name of the field, selecting the type of field it is and then entering whatever information you need to store. You can also add tags, notes, link passwords to others and upload attachments. All of the things!
SECURITY
When it comes to security - the same as the personal plans - 1Password also has a feature called Watchtower - which looks for leaked passwords online and warns if you any have been leaked. It will also prompt you if you are reusing passwords or are using any weak passwords, which is a good reminder to perhaps make them a little more secure.
I really like that 1Password isn't trying to make this service sound more than it is by adding those words 'Dark Web' into the description, like most other companies do. So extra brownie point for that too.
DEATH
Following on from security, there is a feature with other password apps that I've reviewed, that allow other people to gain access to your account in the event you are incapacitated...so like, death or serious injury. The way it works for those other apps, are that you nominate who should have access, and specify a delay for how quickly they can take access - which then gives you a chance to reject their request if you aren't in fact, dead.
But with 1Password they believe this method itself is not secure, because to give others access to your account means that they would need to know the encryption keys to your data, so they can give it to others. Which is a fair point.
1Password deals with this in a more old school way - by issuing you with a rescue kit. Which essentially is a piece of paper, where you write down the secret token, username and password which you then store away in a safe or give to someone you trust. Then to gain access, this person just enters those encryption keys and gains full access.
There's definitely the whole security vs convenience thing here. It's definitely not as convenient over the other apps, but I can't really argue as it's certainly more secure.
BACKUP AND RECOVERY
Let's move on to Backup and Recovery - because have you ever been in those situations where you maybe change a password, then fast forward a month, try to login and then realise that the password change didn't actually work? But your password software only has the newest version.. which means you're locked out!
This happens to me. More times than I'd be willing to admit, given that I'm in IT...
But with 1Password you can see previous versions, and recover deleted passwords for up to a whole year! So that is really handy as you can just go pull that old password back out again.
SUPPORT
Finally we come to Support.
On 1Passwords own website it says they have 'Unrivalled Support' so I sent a fake email into 1password support to see how quickly they came back.
Email sent at 3.27pm on Monday 8th Feb.
Response (and fix) came back on ... wait for it. Monday, the 8th February, at 3.42. A huge 15 minutes later. Fantastic!
I then replied back to that to ask for more information, and then 30 minutes later got another reply.
And this has been consistent with every interaction I've had with 1Password over the years. I'm never left waiting - something I'm actually really, really looking forward to testing when I do my next round of password comparisons.
PRICING
Pricing wise, you're looking at $4.99 per month for a family of 5, BUT you can get 50% off a family subscription which brings the price down much further. Or if you're looking for a personal subscription then there's 50% off that too.
Pricing wise that $4.99 price pre-discount puts you in line with the likes of other password tools out there, but the 50% discount is very good and well worth it!
Thanks for reading. If you want to see the video for this post, click here.
