Something like a modest amount a month kept leaving my company card for a marketing tool nobody on my team had opened in over a year. That single line item is what dragged me back into our team's password spreadsheet, the one my IT director still calls industry standard for a group our size, and it's what finally pushed me toward an actual password manager instead of patching the spreadsheet again: specifically, 1Password. I run marketing ops at a mid-size B2B SaaS company in Austin, and until recently my entire cybersecurity setup was a shared document and whatever Chrome felt like remembering that day.
Quick disclosure before the comparison: some of the links below are affiliate links, and I earn a commission if you sign up through them, at no extra cost to you. I've paid for 1Password, Proton Pass, and RoboForm myself, on my own card, the same way I paid for the LastPass plan I'm about to walk away from. Nobody sent me a free trial for any of this.
A friend of mine, who never misses pickleball night at Pharr Tennis Center, asked me recently why I'd bother switching off something free. Fair question. Here's the honest side-by-side answer: spreadsheet and Chrome autofill on one side, an actual vault on the other.
The Chrome Autofill Illusion
Autofill isn't a password manager, it just plays one inside your browser. For two years that was my entire system for work logins: whatever Chrome remembered, it filled, and I never thought about it past that. Then one afternoon it refused to fill anything on a HubSpot support login page, and that refusal is the only reason I'm not writing this from a much worse place. I looked closer and the domain read hubsp0t.com, a zero standing in for the letter O, close enough that I would have typed straight through it if autofill had simply cooperated.
That one-character swap is a textbook case of domain spoofing, a trick that costs almost nothing to set up and is easy to miss when you're moving fast between browser tabs. Browser-stored passwords and a dedicated vault aren't the same category of tool, either, even though they look identical from the address bar: one is a convenience feature bolted onto a browser, the other is built to notice exactly the kind of mismatch that saved me here. Relying on autofill for every work account had worked for two years, right up until the day it very nearly didn't, and a near miss is a bad way to find out your system has a hole in it.
The spreadsheet compounded the problem in a different way. A dozen of our team's saved logins turned out to be the same password with one digit swapped, which is exactly the pattern that makes credential stuffing such an effective attack against marketing teams: crack one account, try the same password everywhere else with a small twist, and you're inside half our stack within the hour.
I Tried Three Others Before Committing
Two other tools got a real trial before I committed to anything, not just a fifteen-minute demo. RoboForm is still the tool I'd hand anyone who fights ugly multi-page checkout forms for a living, and I looked hard at whether it's actually safe for marketing ops before deciding it wasn't quite my daily driver. Proton Pass made a genuinely good privacy pitch, bundled in with mail and VPN, but sharing a vault with a team felt clunkier than it should have. Comparing three password dashboards side by side, watching each one score the same batch of old logins, produces its own kind of eye strain: the glare off two manager tabs left open at once by midday is not subtle.
That process of elimination is what put 1Password in the lead before I'd even looked closely at its encryption, mostly because it was the only one of the three that didn't ask me to compromise on how my team actually shares access.
LastPass's Breach Is Old News, But the Risk Model Isn't
LastPass and 1Password solve the same problem on paper: encrypt everything locally, sync it, unlock it with one password. Where they part ways is what happens if the vendor itself gets breached. In December 2022, LastPass disclosed that encrypted customer vault backups had been exfiltrated in an earlier breach, and vaults protected by weak master passwords were considered at real risk of offline cracking. That's not hypothetical, it's the specific reason I stopped trusting a vault I'd used for years: the breach put the whole security question back on my own master password, not on the vendor's infrastructure.
A strong master password is really its own topic, and I won't pretend I can do it justice here. What I can say is that 1Password adds a zero-knowledge encryption layer on top of it, meaning even the company itself can't read your vault, and I'll leave the deeper mechanics of how its Secret Key works to the article that actually covers that properly. That framing made the end-to-end encryption pitch feel less like marketing copy and more like an actual design decision. If you want the fuller vault-versus-vault breakdown, I already wrote up 1Password vs Bitwarden for marketing managers and most of the same logic applies here.
What Does It Actually Cost to Leave a Password Manager?
Vault portability is the part nobody markets and everybody should ask about before committing to any of these tools. Every vendor makes it easy to get your logins in; almost none of them advertise how the export behaves when you want them back out. Moving off LastPass, I exported a CSV and found a batch of entries had landed with the URL field blank or pointing at the wrong site entirely, so some banking logins showed up filed under a marketing tool's address instead of a bank's. Fixing it meant opening each mismatched entry by hand, confirming the real site, and re-saving it inside 1Password one at a time.
The export itself was free. What wasn't free, or at least not without a fight, was the family plan I'd added to LastPass the year before, which auto-renewed after I thought I'd already cancelled it during the free window. Getting that reversed took a support ticket, a screenshot of the cancellation confirmation email I'd luckily kept, and several days of back-and-forth before anyone credited it. Portability, it turns out, isn't just about the data, it's about whether the vendor makes leaving as frictionless as joining, and LastPass didn't.
Sharing a Vault Without Sharing Everything
Shared vault permissions sound simple until you actually assign them under a deadline. Setting up our team vault, I added a contractor to what I thought was the read-only marketing group and actually dropped her into the group with edit access to our ad platform credentials, a mistake I didn't catch for several days because nothing about the interface flagged it as unusual. Nothing went wrong in the end, but the fix was a reminder that a shared vault is only as safe as whoever last edited its group settings, and that's a human failure point, not a cryptographic one. It's the same instinct as leaving a spare house key with a neighbor you actually trust instead of taping it under the mat: you're not avoiding trust, you're being specific about who holds it and why.
Watchtower turned a vague, ongoing worry about years-old logins into a finite list I could actually close out, which is what finally made ditching the spreadsheet feel finished instead of an open-ended chore. Layering two-factor authentication or a passkey on top of individual accounts is a separate decision from the vault itself, and one I made for every account that offered it, since the vault protects the password and the second factor protects you from a password that leaks anyway regardless.
Two other habits round out the setup without adding much friction. The Emergency Kit, the one-page printout with your Secret Key, isn't optional busywork, it's what saves you if your laptop dies before you've backed the key up anywhere else. Flipping on Travel Mode before flying to any trade show temporarily hides vaults I don't need to carry across a border, and running Incogni alongside the vault sends opt-out requests to data broker sites, which is a different problem than password reuse but feeds the same phishing risk once your inbox is public record. I wrote up using Incogni to remove my data separately, if you want the fuller version.
The Verdict: Spreadsheet, LastPass, or 1Password
Stick with a spreadsheet only if your team is small enough that you'd notice a leak within a day and you're comfortable being the single point of failure yourself. Stay on LastPass if you've already audited your master password against the 2022 disclosure and are confident it would survive an offline cracking attempt, though that's a narrow bet to keep making twice. Move to 1Password if you want breach monitoring, exportable data that doesn't scramble on the way out, and a vault built for a team where more than one person makes mistakes under a deadline, because that last part was never going to change no matter which tool we used.