For years the password-manager decision was easy: Bitwarden if you wanted free and open source, 1Password if you wanted polish and were happy to pay. Two things changed that. In January 2026 Bitwarden doubled the price of its Premium plan, and Proton Pass, barely three years old, built a free tier that does things the others charge for. This comparison looks at all three as they stand in early 2026: security design and audits, passkey support, family plans, price, and the migration path if you are coming from a browser or from Microsoft Authenticator, which stopped storing passwords last year.
Why you still need a password manager in the passkey era
Passkeys are replacing passwords on the accounts that matter most, and we recommend them; our guide to 2FA methods explains why they are phishing-resistant in a way codes are not. But most websites still use passwords, many of those that support passkeys keep a password as a fallback, and passkeys themselves need a home that syncs across your devices. A password manager in 2026 is that home: it stores passwords, generates unique ones, fills them only on the matching domain (which defeats look-alike phishing pages), and increasingly stores passkeys alongside them.
Browser-built-in managers from Google, Apple and Microsoft do the basics. The three products here go further with cross-platform apps, sharing, breach monitoring and audited, open designs. If you have just recovered a hijacked account, the step-by-step in what to do when your Google account is hacked ends with "get a password manager," and this is the follow-up.
How we compared them
This comparison is desk research over the three products' own documentation, pricing pages and published audits, plus the cited reviews. The five criteria below are weighted roughly in this order:
- Security design and audits. Zero-knowledge encryption is table stakes. What separates the three is how much code is open for inspection and how recently outside firms tested it.
- Passkey support. Can it create, store and sync passkeys on every platform, and is that free?
- Free tier and price. What you get for nothing, what the individual plan costs, and what a family of five or six pays.
- Sharing and families. Shared vaults, admin controls and account recovery for relatives who forget master passwords.
- Everyday usability. Autofill reliability, app quality across Windows, macOS, iOS, Android and Linux, and extras such as email aliases and built-in authenticators.
Prices below are as of March 2026, billed annually, in US dollars.
Bitwarden: open source, self-hostable, and now $19.80 a year
Bitwarden's defining feature is that every client and the server are open source, and you can run the whole thing yourself if you do not trust anyone's cloud. It is also the most heavily audited of the three: Bitwarden's compliance page lists 2025 assessments by Cure53, Unit 42, IOActive and others, plus a cryptography review by ETH Zurich's Applied Cryptography Group, alongside ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type 2 certification.
The free plan remains unusually generous: unlimited passwords on unlimited devices, passkey storage, and a free two-person organization for sharing with a partner. What changed on January 21, 2026 is the paid tier. Bitwarden relaunched Premium at $1.65 a month, billed annually at $19.80, and Families at $3.99 a month, or $47.88 a year for up to six users. The new Premium adds vault health alerts, password coaching, 5 GB of attachment storage (up from 1 GB) and support for up to 10 hardware security keys, with a phishing blocker promised. Existing Premium subscribers get a one-time 25% discount on their first renewal.
Twenty dollars is still cheap. The problem was the framing. The previous price was $9.99 a year, so this is a 98% increase, the first in Premium's roughly ten-year history, and as Fast Company pointed out, it was announced inside a feature post rather than as a price change, with a monthly figure quoted for a plan that is only sold annually. Thurrott summarized it more bluntly: the plan was enhanced and the price doubled.
What Premium still gates matters for the comparison: the built-in TOTP authenticator, emergency access, encrypted attachments and the vault health reports all require paying. The free tier is a password and passkey store, and a very good one, but nothing more.
1Password: the polished option for families and passkeys
1Password has no free tier and has never pretended to. What you pay for is the most refined set of apps in the category, Watchtower breach monitoring, travel mode, and a sharing and recovery model that works for people who are not technical. In a family plan, an organizer can recover a member's account if they forget their password; in Bitwarden and Proton Pass, a forgotten master password usually means a lost vault.
Security is closed-source on the client side but heavily certified. 1Password's security assessments page lists ISO 27001, 27017, 27018 and 27701 plus SOC 2 Type 2, with annual penetration-test reports now published through its Trust Center. Its design adds a 128-bit Secret Key to your master password, so a stolen copy of the encrypted vault cannot be brute-forced with the password alone.
Passkeys are 1Password's strongest suit. It saves and fills them in every major browser and on iOS and Android, syncs them across all of your devices, and can itself be unlocked with a passkey instead of a master password. As of March 2026 the personal pricing page lists Individual at $3.99 a month and Families at $5.99 a month for up to five people, both billed annually, with a first-year promotion for new customers at $2.99 and $4.49 and a 14-day free trial.
Proton Pass: the strongest free tier, with aliases and dark-web alerts
Proton Pass comes from the Swiss company behind Proton Mail and inherits its privacy posture: Swiss jurisdiction, open-source clients under GPLv3, and a Cure53 audit of the apps, extensions and API published in 2023. Security.org's March 2026 comparison scored it 9.5 out of 10 against Bitwarden's 8.6, largely on its included dark-web monitoring and alias features.
The free plan includes unlimited logins on unlimited devices, apps for browser, desktop and mobile, a password generator, alerts for weak and reused passwords, ten hide-my-email aliases and, crucially, passkeys on every platform. Proton made a point of not putting passkeys behind a paywall, noting that many rivals only offer them on paid plans or specific platforms.
Pass Plus adds unlimited aliases, the built-in 2FA authenticator, secure vault and link sharing, dark-web monitoring, file attachments and emergency access. Security.org lists it at $2.99 a month, with Pass Family at $4.99 a month for up to six users. If you already pay for Proton Unlimited, Pass Plus is included.
Where Proton Pass trails: it is the youngest product, the desktop apps are newer and less mature than 1Password's, and there is no self-hosting option. Aliases are also a mixed blessing; they are excellent for privacy, but you are tying your logins to Proton's alias infrastructure.
Passkey support compared: which one syncs passkeys for free
All three can store website passkeys and sync them across devices. The differences are cost and coverage.
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| Bitwarden | 1Password | Proton Pass | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Create and store passkeys | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Sync across devices | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Free of charge | Yes | No (paid only) | Yes |
| Unlock the vault itself with a passkey | Limited (web vault) | Yes | No |
| Platforms | Browser extensions, iOS, Android | Browser extensions, iOS, Android, desktop | Browser extensions, iOS, Android, desktop |
If passkeys are the reason you are choosing a manager, Bitwarden and Proton Pass give you them for nothing, and 1Password gives you the smoothest experience for $48 a year. Setup on the big three platforms is covered in our passkey setup guide.
Pricing table: free, individual and family plans
As of March 2026, billed annually:
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| Bitwarden | 1Password | Proton Pass | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free plan | Unlimited logins and devices, passkeys, 2-person sharing | 14-day trial only | Unlimited logins and devices, passkeys, 10 aliases |
| Individual | $19.80/year ($1.65/mo) | $47.88/year ($3.99/mo); $35.88 first year for new customers | About $35.88/year ($2.99/mo) |
| Family | $47.88/year for up to 6 | $71.88/year for up to 5; $53.88 first year | About $59.88/year for up to 6 |
| Built-in authenticator (TOTP) | Premium | Included | Plus |
| Email aliases | Via third-party integrations | No | 10 free, unlimited on Plus |
| Dark-web / breach monitoring | Premium (vault health alerts) | Included (Watchtower) | Plus |
| Emergency access / account recovery | Premium | Included, with family recovery | Plus |
| Self-hosting | Yes | No | No |
| Open-source clients | Yes | No | Yes |
Bitwarden is still the cheapest paid plan, and its family plan undercuts both rivals per person. 1Password is the most expensive but includes everything at one tier. Proton Pass sits between them and gives away the most for free.
Migrating from browser-saved passwords or Microsoft Authenticator
All three import from Chrome, Edge, Safari, Firefox and from each other via CSV or native formats. The process is the same: export from the old location, import into the new manager, verify a few logins work, then delete the export file, which is plain text, and disable the browser's own password saving so you do not end up with two diverging stores.
Microsoft Authenticator users have a specific job. Microsoft removed password storage from the app in stages: new passwords could not be added from June 2025, autofill stopped in July, and saved data became inaccessible in the app in mid-August 2025. Passwords were synced to your Microsoft account and remain visible in Microsoft Edge (Settings > Passwords, or via the Microsoft Password Manager), which is where you export from. Saved payment details were deleted outright. Authenticator's 2FA codes and passkeys were unaffected, so you can keep using it for those, or move the TOTP secrets into Bitwarden Premium, 1Password or Proton Pass Plus.
One caution for any migration: passkeys generally do not export. A passkey stored in iCloud Keychain or Google Password Manager has to be recreated in the new manager, site by site. Do the important accounts first and leave the rest until you next log in.
Verdict: which to pick for free, for families, for privacy purists
If you want the best free option: Proton Pass. Unlimited logins, unlimited devices, passkeys everywhere, and ten email aliases thrown in. Bitwarden Free is a close second and the better choice if you might self-host later or prefer the more established product.
If you are setting up a family: 1Password Families. Five people for $71.88 a year is the priciest option, but account recovery for a relative who forgets their master password is the feature that saves you a weekend. Bitwarden Families at $47.88 for six is the value pick if everyone is comfortable managing their own recovery.
If you are a privacy purist or a tinkerer: Bitwarden. Fully open source, self-hostable, and audited more often than anything else here. The Premium price doubled, but $19.80 a year is still less than a coffee a month and buys the authenticator, emergency access and vault health reports.
If you already pay Proton: Proton Pass Plus is included in Proton Unlimited, and the alias integration with Proton Mail is the best in the category.
If you just want it to work and money is not the issue: 1Password Individual. The apps are the most polished, Watchtower is excellent, and the passkey experience is the smoothest, including unlocking the vault itself without a master password.
Sources and further reading
- Bitwarden launches enhanced Premium plan (Bitwarden blog)bitwarden.com
- Bitwarden announced a price hike in the worst way possible (Fast Company)fastcompany.com
- Bitwarden Enhances Premium Plan, Doubles Price (Thurrott)thurrott.com
- Compliance, Audits, and Certifications (Bitwarden Help)bitwarden.com
- Password Manager Pricing for Individuals and Families (1Password)1password.com
- Security assessments (1Password Support)support.1password.com
- Proton Pass: Pricing and Plans (Proton)proton.me
- Proton Pass supports passkeys on all devices and platforms (Proton)proton.me
- Proton Pass vs Bitwarden 2026 (Security.org)security.org
- Changes to Microsoft Authenticator autofill (Microsoft Support)support.microsoft.com