[Fogest]

Is there a feature comparrison or reasoning you may have about why 1password may be better than Keepass? I have been using Keepass as I use Linux, Windows, and Phone for accessing my passwords. I am wondering if 1password has some neat helpful features that Keepass doesn't. I am considering switching to a new password manager.

[AGKyle]

We don't generally do feature comparisons. So many products operate under different sets of requirements that comparison charts can be very easily rigged to make one thing look significantly better than the other.

I can tell you one thing that is indisputably better about 1Password though.

Support.

Quite literally. We have a team of over 30 customer support personnel (in addition to myself and other developers who pitch in for a part of our day). We're here to help if you run into problems, encounter a bug, have feature requests, or generally just want questions answered about how we do things or why something is done the way it's done.

Keepass, as noble as it is to have an open source and free product, is run and improved by volunteers. I realize that not many people on hacker news really care that much about support since we're all typically very capable people, but as someone who has been with AgileBits for nearly 5 years now and seen a whole lot of the weird edge cases that can exist because some webpage is doing something incredibly weird or some particular computer setup is causing problems. It can be really helpful to know that there are people who can look into these things for you instead of having to know it yourself.

1Password does have a 30 day trial (both for our standalone product and for our individual/family/team subscriptions). You can try it yourself and see how it works for you. And as always, if you have questions during this time you're welcome to get in touch (support at agilebits.com, mention my name if you want and it'll notify me) and we'll help you get things setup. We think the product speaks for itself and we're happy to fill in any gaps if you need more :)

Kyle

AgileBits

[Fogest]

Out of the year I have been using Keepass I have never had a time where something was wrong that I would need support for.

I am actually not sure what I would need support for either, it seems pretty basic. I am simply storing passwords. It doesn't seem too complicated. And maybe this is because I am a tech person, so maybe I am looking for the more technical reasons why the software may be better rather than how the support excels. Because if keepass had a problem I know ways to get support anyway, either via a Stackexchange site or IRC. So I am definitely a bias group.

However I do not care if the software is open source or not. I know some people do care about that, but the people I talk to do not. People in my age group seem less concerned about open source or closed source.

I'm more curious if there are some kind of features in the product itself that make it better than keepass? I do not have a family so the family cloud version of 1password is not useful, though I would not be opposed to a cloud version of 1password for an individual. I currently store my keepass in dropbox and have that synced to all the devices I use.

[AGKyle]

An example I like to give for why 1Password Families has helped me is this:

I work remotely for my job. I do travel several times a year as a result and when I'm gone I have other family members watch my house. Before 1Password Families I had to find a way to easily get my wifi password, my garage door code, and various other instructions and information to whoever was watching my house.

With 1Password Families I simply create a vault in my Family, add my items to it and invite the person who will be watching my house as a guest (or in my most recent case, granted my brother access to the vault).

In the first case, the person simply signed up, installed 1Password and they had access to the data. In the second case, my brother simply unlocked 1Password and the vault was there.

When I get back home, I simply remove access and those things disappear from their devices. None of these are so important that I have to change them, but, that's another step as well if necessary.

But that is how easy it is to share and use vaults in 1Password Families (and Teams).

I also love that using this I can add family members, like my parents, and it handles all the syncing for them so I don't have to micro manage it with backups and other stuff. It's a far more seamless experience. And since I hold the keys to the family kingdom, I can also reset their master password for them if they forget it.

Now, you might think you have no use for this, and that's fine, but it's an example of how someone who doesn't have an immediate family (I'm single, and childless) was able to use 1Password Families in a way that wasn't obvious when I first set out to use it for myself.

In terms of features that differentiate us from Keepass, I have never used Keepass so I am not able to speak to what we do differently. I'm sure there are things each of us do better though.

There is a trial version of 1Password, so, you could use it and see how it stacks up for yourself. I'd be very curious what you find better or worse so I can pass that feedback along to our team. Completely optional of course.

Kyle

AgileBits

[Fogest]

Sure, I'll give some of my thoughts about it when I first fired up the trial.

The installer gave me an option to create desktop icon, but gave me no option to start the program when it was finished installing. It was odd having to go find and run the program once it was done installing, it is typical for most installers to give me an option to run after install. Not a big deal, but I thought it was worth a mention.

When I opened up 1Password I clicked "I am new to 1Password", and noticed that the prompt to select a location to store my keychain is under the program itself. This is annoying as I have to move it around to properly use the file explorer. Seems like a bug. Here is an image of what I am talking about: http://i.imgur.com/0Z6xTTq.png . Clicking on the file dialogue does not bring it above the 1Password application, it is stuck hiding behind it.

Entering the master password makes me enter my password twice, which makes sense, however it is odd that there is one password strength bar for both the "new" password and "re-enter" password section. The passwords should be identical, why tell me the same thing twice? http://i.imgur.com/ySXxT8g.png

I am quite confused with how I can import Keepass data into 1Password. Some googling shows I may need to use some perl scripts someone made to import them properly. I tried exporting my keepass database to csv and importing that but there were many problems. I used a lot of specific Keepass things like folders, as well as having a duplicate record that makes reference to another password entry.

Scrolling through the list of passwords is quite choppy and not smooth at all.

The search is slower than Keepass.

For the use cases you gave of sharing passwords I'd just print them out on a sheet of paper to be honest. It actually seems easier to me than sharing passwords via a program.

And on the top of micro managing and backups. I just use dropbox which by default keeps version history so managing backups is not really a thing for me.

So in my honest opinion for now I will likely be sticking with Keepass, for the reasons above, as well as because it does not support all of the platforms I use, which in my opinion is quite a critical feature as I want my passwords on every device.

[AGKyle]

Thanks for the feedback. I'm afraid most of my experience is with the Mac and iOS applications, since I work directly on those. However, the Windows application you are using has more or less been sunset and we're working on a new Windows app that you can read more about here:

https://discussions.agilebits.com/discussion/64591/help-us-w...

We are targeting a release soon. This version is a complete rewrite so it'll be missing some of the things that our Mac, iOS and Android applications have, but over time we'll be continuing to improve it. Having a base we can build on was the critical goal for this upcoming release though.

So, not to brush off your concerns for the version you tried (it is the one that we are making available to users still) there will likely be an entirely different set of concerns with the new one, but mostly because it lacks other features that you may expect to be present. But I do believe it solves most of the concerns you did raise :)

Thanks a ton for taking the time to give it a shot and let me know how it was for you. I am sorry it was, what appears to be anyway, an unpleasant experience. Our Windows app has traditionally been one that has lagged behind our Mac version but we are attempting to right that now.

If we can ever answer any questions for you, or help at all in the future, please let us know!

Thanks again!

Kyle

AgileBits