Two hundred and eighty-seven logins live in a password manager that isn't LastPass anymore, and the SaaS habit that got me there started with a single phishing email that almost worked. Proton Pass is where those logins ended up, and the privacy angle is the actual reason, not the vault swap everyone assumes fixes things.
Quick disclosure before the corrections start: the links to password managers and privacy tools below are affiliate links, sign up through one and I get a small cut, your bill doesn't change. Every product mentioned got charged to my own card and used long enough to know where it breaks. I'm not a security professional, just a marketing ops person who ran out of patience with spreadsheets.
Switching Vaults Doesn't Fix What You Think It Fixes
The common wisdom goes like this: leave LastPass, land somewhere else, problem solved. That's the myth, and it's the same one that let a spoofed HubSpot login page get one character away from stealing my credentials back in 2022. The domain was off by a single letter, the kind of domain-spoofing trick that still shows up in my spam folder on a slow week, and no vault on earth would have stopped me from typing my password into a page that looked exactly right.
My friend Roxanne, who runs marketing ops at a different Austin SaaS company, still shows up to every industry meetup with a fan of color-coded sticky notes she leaves behind on the table without fail. I ran my old team's password sharing the same way: organized, color-coded, and eventually abandoned. A shared Google Sheet with a tab for every department looked responsible for about a month, right up until someone left the company and nobody remembered to pull their access before the sheet moved on without them.
Shared vault permissions solve exactly the problem that sheet couldn't: they decide who can see a credential versus who can only use it without ever revealing the characters, and revoking someone takes one click instead of an audit nobody has time for. Both 1Password and Proton run on zero-knowledge encryption underneath, meaning the company itself can't read what's stored, a promise no spreadsheet, color-coded or not, ever came close to making. The other version of this same myth is assuming your browser's built-in password saver is basically the same tool with a worse logo. It isn't, not once you need real sharing, aliases, or a breach alert that actually reaches you instead of sitting in a settings tab you never open.
1Password's vault sharing for marketing teams is the version of team access I trust most for a department: fast to set up, granular enough to matter, and the reason nobody has had to ask me about a color-coded tab since I turned it on.
RoboForm entered the testing lineup too, mostly because its RoboForm autofill survives checkout flows that break every other manager I've tried, the multi-step kind with a billing step hidden behind a modal. Form-filling automation like that is genuinely underrated, and it's still the reason I keep a RoboForm login around for expense reports. What it never solved was the sharing problem: the interface hasn't caught up to how teams actually hand off access, which is the whole complaint I wrote up in the form filler that quietly beats everyone at checkout and nowhere else.
So What Actually Breaks When You Migrate?
Proton Pass is where I ended up, and Proton Pass's real selling point isn't the vault mechanics at all, it's the hide-my-email aliases that hand out a disposable address to every gated whitepaper and trial signup instead of my actual inbox. Email aliasing like that quietly kills the thing that made the HubSpot scare possible in the first place: an attacker needs to know your real address before they can spoof anything convincing.
Underneath, Proton relies on bcrypt for key derivation and wraps everything in AES-256, the same encryption-cipher standard most serious vaults lean on, though I'll leave the deep mechanics to the Proton Pass security architecture breakdown I wrote separately, since that's not what actually changed my exposure.
Portability, it turns out, was the easy part. Every vault I tried could export and import a CSV eventually, and I've already written up how I moved hundreds of logins without the process itself breaking anything. Vault portability being solvable is exactly why the migration itself was never the real test of whether switching helped.
The actual tell came at a gate at Austin-Bergstrom, waiting to board with a line building up behind me. My phone buzzed, Face ID unlocked the vault before the boarding pass had even finished loading, and I realized the thing that changed wasn't my stress level, it was that I'd stopped digging through three apps to find a code while a gate agent watched.
That contrast mattered more once I tried moving a relative onto a vault this year. She's not careless, just unfamiliar with recovery phrases and browser extensions, and end-to-end encryption without a human on the phone to explain it turned into a locked door with no key, not a safeguard. Migration difficulty was never the barrier for me. For her, the total absence of phone support was.
The Root Cause Nobody Vaults Away
Here's the correction, then: the vault swap isn't what protects you, closing off the exposure that got you phished in the first place is. That means fixing the email problem instead of just relocating the same inbox to a shinier app, and it means treating the small settings nobody bothers with as the actual security layer.
Two-factor and passkeys where they're offered, a master password long enough to be annoying to type out loud, and a secret key that backs up 1Password's master password with a second factor Proton doesn't ask for at all: none of it is glamorous, and all of it matters more than which logo sits on the app icon. I also keep the emergency kit printed and stashed somewhere that isn't my laptop bag, and I still flag Travel Mode on before conferences, since Proton doesn't have an equivalent yet and I'm not willing to go without one.
Breach monitoring runs the whole time in the background, quietly, the kind of alert that flags a service you signed up for years ago the moment its user table leaks, long before the story makes any headlines.
A reader named Femi, who runs marketing for a healthcare SaaS startup in Dallas, emailed after reading about the switch and laid it out the way he always does: a bullet-pointed list of exactly which parts matched his eight-person team and which didn't. The one item that didn't surprise me at all was his assumption that picking a new vault would have solved his exposure on its own. Same myth, different company logo.
Whether Proton's paid tier is worth it depends entirely on whether you actually want the Mail and VPN bundle alongside the vault, not just the password piece, since the seat and plan structure is built around the whole ecosystem rather than Pass by itself. It also lets you hand someone a one-time secure link instead of pasting a password into a message and hoping they delete it, which is the safe version of everything my old spreadsheet habit was trying and failing to do.
Weighing 1Password, Proton Pass, and RoboForm Honestly
1Password still wins on polish: the 1Password family plan covers up to five people with an interface that doesn't make anyone feel like they're doing IT work, and Watchtower's dashboard is the closest thing to a report card this category has. Proton wins on the actual root-cause fix, the aliases and the bundle, even though its sharing screens still feel like the newest kid in the family. RoboForm wins the second you're stuck in a checkout flow that hates every other autofill you own, and RoboForm earns its spot for that reason alone.
So here's the rule, not the myth: pick Proton Pass if the email exposure is your actual problem and you don't mind fewer bells on the sharing side, pick 1Password if a polished team rollout matters more than the alias trick, and keep RoboForm around as a second app for checkout pain rather than your main vault. Don't switch and assume the exposure that got you here is fixed just because the app icon changed. That part still takes deliberate cleanup on your end, regardless of which vault holds the password.