The Best Password Manager for a Small Business

Most advice on this subject is written for one person protecting their own accounts. That is a solved problem, and several products solve it for nothing.

A business has a different problem, and it only becomes visible on somebody's last day. Who still has the Instagram login? Who set up the domain registrar account? Is the shared bookkeeping password the one that also opens the bank?

That is what you are buying. Storage is free; control is what costs $4 a head.

The three things a business plan adds

Before any product comparison, it is worth being precise about what the paid tier actually gives you, because it is a short list and none of it is about password storage.

Shared vaults. A container the whole team, or a group within it, can see. This matters more than it sounds: sharing individual items one at a time works for three logins and collapses at thirty, because nobody remembers which items were shared with whom.

Revocation. One switch that ends someone's access to everything at once. A personal plan has no equivalent — you would have to remember every credential they were ever sent.

Visibility. An admin view of who has access to what, and which accounts are protected by a weak or reused password. This is the part that turns a vault into something you can actually run a business on.

Bitwarden — the one that publishes its prices

Teams is $4 per user per month and Enterprise is $6, both billed annually, checked on Bitwarden's pricing page on 31 August 2026. A five-person business is $20 a month.

In a category where most vendors route business buyers into a sales conversation, publishing a number is a genuine advantage for a small business — you can budget it, sign up for it, and never speak to anyone.

The other structural advantage is that Bitwarden's free plan is not a demo. It includes unlimited devices, unlimited passwords, browser, mobile and desktop apps, zero-knowledge encryption, and free sharing with one other user. So every person on your team can install it, use it properly for a month, and you can upgrade to Teams once you know it stuck rather than before.

Bitwarden is open source, which is a real and often overstated benefit. It does not make the product more secure by itself; what it does mean is that the encryption implementation can be independently examined rather than taken on trust. For a business that has to justify the choice to somebody, that is a useful thing to be able to say.

The honest cost is polish. Bitwarden's interface is functional rather than pleasant, and on a team with people who dislike software that friction is not free.

Right for: most small businesses, and particularly any with a technical person involved or a fixed budget.

1Password — the most polished, at an undisclosed price

1Password publishes its personal pricing — Individual at $2.99 a month paid annually (regular price $3.99) and Families at $4.49 paid annually (regular $5.99), covering up to 5 family members, with a 14-day free trial.

Its business and enterprise pages do not publish rates. Both direct you to request a quote, with the enterprise page describing pricing as "built for you." That is not a criticism of the product, but it is a practical difference: budgeting requires a conversation, and the price you are offered is not necessarily the price someone else is offered.

What you get for it is the best-executed product in the category. The apps are genuinely pleasant, the browser filling is the most reliable, and the onboarding is gentle enough that non-technical staff adopt it without a training session. In a small business where the failure mode is people going back to a notebook, that is worth paying for.

Right for: teams where adoption is the risk rather than the budget, and businesses happy to have a sales conversation.

Proton Pass — strong free tier, privacy-first positioning

Proton Pass's free plan is unusually complete: unlimited logins, notes and credit cards, unlimited devices, browser, mobile and desktop apps, a password generator, alerts for weak and reused passwords, passkeys supported on all devices, and 10 hide-my-email aliases.

Secure vault sharing sits on Pass Plus rather than the free tier, which is the line that matters for business use — free Proton Pass is for individuals, and the team features are paid. Its paid prices did not render on the pricing page when we checked, so budget from a quote rather than from a figure here.

The distinctive feature is the email aliasing. Being able to give every service a different address is a meaningful security improvement rather than a gimmick, because it limits what a breach at one vendor tells an attacker about your other accounts.

Right for: businesses that already use Proton for mail, and anyone for whom the privacy model is part of the pitch to clients.

Dashlane and NordPass — check the prices yourself

Both are credible products and neither displayed prices on the pages we checked, so we are not going to quote figures for them.

What we can report is structure. Dashlane offers Premium and a Friends & Family plan described as "10 accounts, one subscription" — the largest household allowance in this comparison — with a 14-day trial on its business product.

NordPass free is one account with, in its own words, "only essential features," and explicitly excludes multi-device access, Password Health, the Data Breach Scanner, the NordPass Authenticator and file attachments. Its Family plan covers 6 user accounts. The absence of multi-device access on the free tier is the important detail — a password manager that only works on one device solves very little.

What five people actually pay

For context, the personal plans that do publish: Bitwarden Premium is $1.65 a month billed annually at $19.80 a year, and 1Password Individual is $2.99 a month paid annually. Those are not business plans and will not solve offboarding, but they tell you the shape of the market.

The question to settle before you buy

What happens if the owner loses their master password?

These products use zero-knowledge encryption, which means the vendor genuinely cannot read your vault and therefore genuinely cannot reset your password for you. That is the security guarantee and it is also the risk.

Business plans generally provide some form of administrator-assisted recovery for staff accounts, which handles the common case of an employee forgetting theirs. What it does not handle is the administrator's own account. Before you migrate anything, decide where the recovery material lives — a printed copy in a safe is not old-fashioned here, it is correct — and make sure more than one person in the business can reach it.

Businesses that skip this step do not discover the problem until the worst possible day.

How to roll it out without it failing

• Start with the shared accounts, not everyone's personal logins. The shared ones are where the actual risk is.
• Import from browsers on day one and then turn browser password saving off. Two stores of passwords is worse than either one alone — the reasons are in this piece on browser-saved passwords.
• Set up two-factor on the password manager itself before anything else goes in.
• Write the offboarding step into your process now, while you remember why you bought this.
• Rotate the genuinely sensitive credentials — banking, domains, payment processing — after the migration, since you do not know who has seen them.

If the two candidates are the obvious two, the detailed comparison is 1Password vs Bitwarden. If budget is genuinely zero for now, the free plans are more capable than most people expect — with one important exception around device limits. And if you are not yet convinced the whole category is trustworthy, that question is worth answering first.