1Password Review

Password manager with a strong family/team focus. Travel Mode hides vaults at borders. Two-secret encryption combines password + device-side Secret Key.

1Password sits at the premium end of the password-manager market, and the security model is the reason it stays there. Every vault is locked with a combination of your account password and a 128-bit Secret Key that's generated on your device and never sent to 1Password's servers. Even if an attacker walked away with the entire server-side database, the data would remain unreadable without that local key.

The company has commissioned more than two dozen independent third-party audits and holds current SOC 2 Type 2 certification, and to date no customer vault has been breached. The feature set leans toward households and travellers. Watchtower runs continuous Have I Been Pwned cross-referencing for breach exposure, weak passwords and missing 2FA, with the evaluation done locally on-device.

Travel Mode is the more unusual piece — before crossing a border, you can flag which vaults are safe for travel, and the rest are removed from your devices entirely until you restore them on the other side. Passkey support is live across Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave and Safari, with biometric unlock on macOS, iOS, Windows Hello and Android.

Pricing is where the friction lives. There's no free tier — only a 14-day trial — and individual plans start at $2.99 / £2.50 a month. The Families plan covers up to five members and five guests from £2.50 a month, with additional people at $1 each per month, and reviewers generally rate it the cleanest household setup in the category.

The trade-off is cost: Trustpilot users have reported a roughly 30% subscription price rise during 2024-25 with limited notice, and support is email and forum only, so resolution can take days. A couple of considerations worth weighing. 1Password is incorporated in Canada, a Five Eyes signals-intelligence partner, which some privacy-focused users factor into their decision.

The Secret Key model also adds an extra recovery artefact in the Emergency Kit PDF — lose it, and the vault is unrecoverable. We'd also avoid storing TOTP codes alongside passwords in the same vault, because a single master-password compromise then unlocks both factors at once. For most households willing to pay for the security ceiling, 1Password is the easiest paid option to recommend.