The best password managers | Apps

Cybercrime cost the global economy $600 billion (£454.66 billion) in 2017, according to a report from McAfee. The impact of cybercrime is ongoing and affects almost every country in the world.

One of the best ways you can protect yourself against online fraud is still by using a strong password and a different one for every site and service that you use. It’s true that you won’t be protected against a data breach that exposes emails and passwords that are not encrypted, but using a complex password for each site will protect you against those credentials being replicated elsewhere.

Plus it makes brute-force spoofing of the user – where software automatically churns through typical dictionary word and letter combinations – much more difficult.

Of course, remembering all of these is not a trivial matter, especially less so when the passwords are a mixture of non-dictionary word letters uppercase and lower, mixed in with numbers and symbols. That’s where a password manager comes in. 

Most password managers work the same way: you will setup an account with a (preferably strong) master password and it will then store credentials for the sites you tend to visit, either manually or through an automated function in the app.

So what makes a good password manager? A strong commitment to security, easy user experience, functionality and price are all factors. 

There are a range of different password managers out there today, some proprietary, some open source – some that have received multiple extensive security audits and some that are offline. Depending on your needs and technical ability, you might want to be able to sync across your cloud services, self-host on your own servers, or use one as a digital wallet. Here we run through some of the best options.

Additional reporting by Hannah Williams.