Six great options for password managers

Using unique and strong passwords for every website is a must for internet security. Too few people know how to do this, and that’s where password managers come in and can make online life easier.

There’s no doubt about it, actually doing the work to stay safe on the web is hard — and getting harder. In order to be truly secure online, each and every login you use needs its own strong, unique password.

We’re starting to see the spread of “passkeys” that make this process easier, since it doesn’t rely on passwords. Until this is universal, however, users should consider a password manager to help them create, manage, and fill in strong passwords.

The password managers we’ve picked here are excellent, free or low-cost, and user-friendly. Furthermore, we’ve checked each company’s privacy policies to ensure that they can’t read any of your stored passwords, thanks to end-to-end encryption.

All six of our managers offer features like two-factor authentication, secure password sharing, and importing existing passwords. They all help you create strong passwords, auto-store them, and report on any passwords that are weak or compromised.

We’ve checked to see if any of the companies reported a compromise or server breach, such as “what happened to LastPass. Thanks to their “zero-knowledge” policies, none of the password managers we list here have been compromised.

Keychain

Being built-in to Apple’s Mac and mobile devices, this is the obvious first choice. Whenever you first sign in or create an account on a website in Safari, Keychain — called “Passwords” in system settings — will pop up and offer to store this new login.

You should always, always say “yes” to this. That login is then stored and encrypted on your device, and then stored on iCloud and synced across your Apple devices.

At one time, what is now called iCloud Passwords only worked with the Safari browser on Mac. As of macOS Sonoma, it now also supports Edge, Chrome, Opera, and other Chromium-based browsers — sorry, Firefox.

You can even use Keychain on PCs by downloading “iCloud for Windows” application, and signing in to your Apple ID. It can then import and sync any logins you have stored in the default…