The autofill icon in my browser just sits there, dead. I'm two clicks from opening what looks exactly like a HubSpot support email — right logo, right shade of orange — and my password manager, Proton Pass, won't fill in the login on the page it opens. That's the tell. The address bar reads hubsp0t.com, a zero standing in for the o, and the extension caught it before my eyes did. Years after the actual scare that started all this, our SaaS logins live in shared vaults now, and the reason I trust them comes down to moments exactly like this one.
Quick housekeeping before I get into how we got here: some of the password manager and security links on this site are affiliate links, mine included. Sign up through one and I earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. I bought every subscription mentioned here myself, on my own card, and ran it on a laptop I keep purely for testing this stuff — nobody sent me a review unit. Full policy's on the About page.
The Spreadsheet That Finally Had to Go
Before Proton Pass, our "Master Marketing Logins" spreadsheet was the thing IT and I fought about — three separate times, each one louder than the last. It was a Google Sheet open to half the company, full of logins like "Password123" and whatever the intern typed in that week. Somewhere between the hubsp0t.com near-miss and my third losing argument with IT, I dragged out the test laptop and got serious about replacing it. I'd already run 1Password, LastPass, and Bitwarden through their paces, notes piling up in a running comparison doc I keep for every trial — LastPass didn't survive that round, for reasons that had nothing to do with vault sharing. This round was about Proton Pass specifically: could its vault sharing actually replace a spreadsheet without adding a new headache.
Why Proton Pass Vaults Felt Different From a Shared Folder
A shared vault works a lot like a household budget: everyone needs visibility, but not everyone needs the power to change the numbers. Most password managers use folders for this. Proton Pass uses "Vaults" instead, which sounds like marketing copy until you actually use it. It's actually closer to handing a neighbor a spare house key than stuffing everything into one filing cabinet. You're not handing over your whole life, just the one door they need. When I floated the idea of moving our accounts over, my manager Soledad didn't ask about aliases or permissions at all. Her first question was what it would cost per seat and when the renewal date would land, which is more or less how she evaluates every tool that touches the budget.
Proton's pitch is really the bundle, not any single feature. RoboForm still wins on raw form-filling, which matters when you're pushing through a dozen lead forms a day, but Proton ties the vault to mail, VPN, and cloud storage under one Swiss-based, zero-knowledge setup — meaning even Proton can't read what's stored inside. That bundle logic is what actually pulled me in, not a spec sheet.
Trial and Error With Fifty-Plus Logins
Six-ish weeks in, I hit the first real snag. I tried moving all fifty-plus of our SaaS logins from the spreadsheet into a test vault in one pass, and the CSV import choked because I'd mislabeled a header column. Every row failed silently, and I didn't notice until I went looking for a login that wasn't there. Two wasted hours, and a reminder that a good vault doesn't fix bad spreadsheet hygiene — it just relocates it. Somewhere in that same stretch, my browser tab bar shrank down to nothing but favicons, six or seven vault apps open at once for side-by-side comparison, no room left for a single label. If you're staring down a similar migration, I wrote up how I manage 50 SaaS subscriptions separately, with the header format that actually works.
One thing that surprised me: the user limit. Proton Pass's family plan allows up to six users, which beats 1Password's family plan cap of five. It's a small difference until you're trying to fit a small creative team onto one subscription, and that sixth seat turns out to matter. RoboForm also caps its family plan at five, so Proton is quietly one of the more generous options for a tight-knit group.
What made the vault worth the trouble was the permission layer underneath it, which is really the whole point of moving off a spreadsheet in the first place. Inside Proton Pass, a vault isn't just a folder. Each person you add gets a role: read-only, so a freelancer can use a login without ever seeing the actual password in plain text; write access, for people who need to update or add entries; and admin, which can invite or remove people from that vault entirely. Permissions are set per vault, not globally, so someone can have full admin rights in "Ad Platforms" and zero access to "Core Marketing" at the same time. A shared spreadsheet can't replicate that — if you can see the tab, you can usually edit everything on it. In a vault, seeing and controlling are two separate switches, and you flip them one person at a time.
What Freelancers and Contractors Exposed
By spring, a pattern showed up that most guides never mention. We run on a mix of freelancers and contractors who need access to social and ad accounts, and standard vault sharing handles that fine right up until rotation gets involved. If we change the LinkedIn password every month, I still have to make sure every contractor's vault syncs and that whoever needs the new two-factor code can actually reach it. Proton Pass stores the authenticator code right inside the login item, which helps, but someone still has to manage who's in and out of the vault as contracts start and end. Whoever holds the export from a shared vault is the one person who could lock everyone else out of it, which is a bigger deal in a team setup than a personal one. 1Password handles a neighboring problem with Travel Mode, hiding selected vaults at border crossings, but that's a different exposure than what was breaking here. For a team our size, none of it outweighed the upgrade from a spreadsheet — though if you're weighing how the bigger providers handle this kind of permission sprawl, my 1Password vs Bitwarden guide covers it from the other side.
The Hide-My-Email Payoff
The feature that actually changed my day-to-day wasn't the shared vault, though. It was hide-my-email aliases. Marketing means signing up for everything: every AI tool a vendor wants you to try, every competitor's newsletter, every webinar landing page. Proton Pass generates a fresh email alias for each one, so when a vendor starts spamming me, or turns out to be selling the address on, I switch off that one alias instead of hunting through my real inbox. A reader named Cressida, an account manager out in Phoenix, wrote in a while back about a similar instinct from a different angle: she stopped trusting her browser's built-in password save after a sync mix-up scrambled her logins once, which is basically the same argument for a dedicated vault over whatever Chrome happens to remember. I've paired the aliases with Incogni to get my information off data broker sites in the first place. Between the two, a credential-stuffing hit on some random third-party site doesn't hand anyone my real email or a password I've reused.
How I Finally Got IT to Sign Off
Winning IT over wasn't about walking them through the cryptography — I'm not qualified to, and I didn't try. I showed them the vault passed their own checklist and let the checklist do the arguing. It helped that I could point to what we were replacing: for months, our backup two-factor codes for shared accounts lived on a sticky note wedged under the keyboard of the test laptop, which is about as far from secure as "Password123" in a spreadsheet. Proton Pass isn't the only one with breach monitoring built in — 1Password's Watchtower flags reused and weak logins the same way — but by the time I brought it up, IT just wanted confirmation the sticky note was gone. I even walked them through how to find lost software product keys on the test laptop, mostly to prove I'd done the legwork instead of just reading marketing copy.
So Was It Actually Worth Switching?
About seven weeks after we actually started relying on the new vaults, not just testing them, the spreadsheet got deleted for good. Nobody noticed for almost a week, because nobody needed it anymore. We run three vaults now: Core Marketing, Freelance Access, and Ad Platforms, each with its own permissions, and only two people on the team hold admin rights across all three. No more "Password123." No more staring at the autofill icon wondering if it's about to save me from myself again. The lesson that stuck, past the tool itself, is that a shared vault only earns its keep once you've actually defined who gets to see something versus who gets to change it — skip that step and you've just built a fancier spreadsheet. If your team is still passing logins around in a Sheet and you want something that fixes the actual permission problem instead of hiding it better, Proton Pass is worth trying. It's rougher around the edges than 1Password's sharing UX, but for a team that wants the vault and the privacy bundle in one subscription, it's held up.