A stolen password can still be typed into a fake login page. A passkey can't: one is a secret you carry around, the other is a cryptographic handshake that flatly refuses to talk to the wrong domain. That difference is the whole case for passkey security, and it's why I finally moved our B2B SaaS logins off passwords and onto 1Password's passkey support instead of just tightening password habits across marketing operations.
Quick disclosure before I get into it: the 1Password, Proton Pass, and RoboForm links below are affiliate links, so I earn a small commission if you sign up through them, at no extra cost on your end. Every one of these I paid for myself, on my own card, and tested on a dedicated laptop before deciding whether it earned a spot in this comparison. Full policy is on my About page.
Two B2B Login Habits, Side by Side
Approach one: a password manager holding traditional passwords, refreshed on whatever schedule I could actually keep up with, backed by two-factor codes when a site supported them. Approach two: a vault that skips the password step entirely and authenticates with a passkey tied to my device. I've run both long enough to have opinions, after trials of LastPass, Bitwarden, Dashlane, Proton Pass, and RoboForm that mostly ended in mild disappointment for one reason or another.
That dedicated test laptop is where the real comparison happens, not in a spec sheet. A password-based habit and a passkey-based habit look almost identical from the outside: same browser extension, same little icon in the toolbar. None of it matters much without a genuinely strong master password sitting behind the whole system, but that's really its own topic. The difference between the two habits only shows up the moment something goes wrong: a wrong domain, a lost device, a login attempt that shouldn't have worked and did.
Where the Spreadsheet Habit Actually Breaks
The spreadsheet habit, still common across B2B marketing teams, breaks at the sharing step. I've had three separate fights with our own IT team about why a shared login sheet is a bad idea, and the argument always lands the same place: nobody knows who has opened that file, copied it, or forwarded it to a personal inbox. It's the corporate cousin of leaving a house key under a mat that's visible from the sidewalk. I already made the longer case for why that matters in Why Zero Knowledge Encryption Matters for My Marketing Ops Team; the short version is a provider that can't see your data is a stronger guarantee than a teammate promising to be careful.
Password managers marketed purely on convenience don't fix this by themselves. I tried making RoboForm my daily driver for a while, mostly because its form-filling handles checkout flows that trip up everything else, but it still left the sharing model exactly where it started: someone still had to trust someone else with a shared credential, just with better autofill. Switching your data out of any of these tools later rarely goes as smoothly as the onboarding page promises, either. Nice as RoboForm is, it's a different problem than the one I actually needed solved.
What Changes When the Login Is a Passkey
Approach two skips passwords entirely. 1Password now supports full passkey logins for the accounts that offer it, and functionally that means signing into our CRM or analytics platform without ever typing or copying a secret anywhere. My device and the server handle the exchange between themselves; I just approve it, usually with a thumbprint.
It runs on the WebAuthn standard, which the FIDO Alliance has pushed for years now. I won't rehash the cryptography here: plenty of other sites already do a better job of that than I will. What I can tell you from actually using it is this: the same off-by-one domain trick that nearly got me in 2022, a fake HubSpot-support sender with one character out of place, simply doesn't work against a passkey. The handshake checks the real domain, not whatever the address bar happens to display.
The Recovery Trade-Off Nobody Puts in the Marketing Copy
Here's the part most marketing copy skips: a passkey stored inside a vault creates a new single point of failure that a plain password doesn't have. Lose access to the vault itself without a backup plan in place, and every passkey inside it is effectively bricked, no "forgot password" link is going to save you the way it might with a traditional login. That's a real cost, not a hypothetical one, worth weighing against the phishing resistance before you roll passkeys out past your own laptop.
On the team side, this is where the conversation with Soledad, my VP of Marketing Operations, got interesting. Soledad cares less about feature lists than she does about seat counts and renewal dates, so the question she actually asked wasn't "is this secure" but "what happens to the account when someone leaves." Fair question. The honest answer involves setting up an emergency kit ahead of time. It also means being deliberate about which vaults are shared versus personal: a family or team plan capped at five users forces you to decide who's actually inside the perimeter instead of letting it sprawl. That's a separate problem from what you'd want hidden at a border crossing, which 1Password handles through its own dedicated travel feature and isn't really what pushed me to switch.
For a while my backup plan for two-factor codes was a sticky note wedged under the keyboard of the test laptop, which is a backup in the same sense that leaving your spare key taped to the front door counts as a security system. It worked exactly until I needed it and couldn't remember which of six sticky notes was current. Deleting our old shared credentials Sheet, once I finally got around to it, felt less like a security milestone and more like clearing out a drawer of expired paperwork: satisfying in a way that had nothing to do with technology.
So Which One Should Run Your B2B Logins?
A reader named Cressida, an account manager out in Phoenix, wrote in with a story that stuck with me: a lingering distrust of browser-native password storage, left over from a syncing incident nobody at her company ever fully explained. That distinction matters more than people give it credit for. A password saved inside a browser and a password saved inside a dedicated vault are not the same category of protection, even when the autofill behavior looks identical from the outside. On the monitoring side, Watchtower flags reused or breached items automatically, which turned password hygiene into a short weekly check instead of a guessing game, and it's part of why I finally moved off the spreadsheets IT loves so much.
So which approach should actually run your B2B logins? Stick with strong, rotated passwords and solid two-factor if your team is small, your recovery options are simple, and nobody's ready to learn a new sign-in habit overnight. Move to passkeys, through 1Password or a comparable vault, once phishing attempts are landing in your inbox on a regular basis, your team has outgrown what a spreadsheet can manage, and you're willing to build a real recovery plan before you need it, not after. I didn't switch because passkeys are trendy. I switched because the failure mode of a stolen password turned out to be worse than the failure mode of a well-backed-up vault.