1Password, Bitwarden, Dashlane, and LastPass, and Where the Admin Controls Actually Sit

Price all four at your real headcount before you shortlist anything. Bitwarden is four dollars a user a month on Teams and six on Enterprise. 1Password is twenty four ninety five flat for ten people on the Starter Pack and eight ninety nine a user on Business. Dashlane quotes its business plans and LastPass prices per user by tier. Ask each of them for the annual figure at your real headcount, on the tier that carries the features you need, and compare those four numbers rather than the ones on the page.

Almost never on the software. It goes wrong on adoption and on offboarding. People keep a second copy of the important credentials somewhere convenient, the shared logins never get an owner, and when somebody leaves the account is disabled but nothing is rotated. Six months later nobody can say with confidence who still has the bank login. The tool did not fail. Nobody was running it.

You do, entirely. You hold your own Zoho Vault subscription in your own name and you pay Zoho directly for it. We work inside it as administrators. If you end this tomorrow the vault, the structure, the collections, and every credential in it stay exactly where they are, and we hand back the administrator seat.

For a lot of businesses, yes, and we would rather say it here than after you have signed. If you have somebody who will genuinely own the vault, Bitwarden Teams at four dollars a user is very hard to argue with, and 1Password is the easiest of the four for people who are not technical. Buy one of them. Come back if the ownership turns out not to exist.

Bitwarden, and it is not close. Four dollars a user a month on Teams, no cap on users, and a free tier underneath it. 1Password’s Starter Pack beats it on a flat basis for very small teams at twenty four ninety five for ten people, but it stops dead at twenty. On license cost alone, both cost less than us. Our fee is for management, and it sits on top of a license you are already paying for.

On a subscription you raise it with the vendor and wait your turn. Bitwarden gives Teams customers priority email around the clock. 1Password answers email, forum, and social around the clock but keeps phone support to weekdays, nine to five Eastern. With us you raise it with us, and we deal with whichever of those queues it belongs in.

No, and it usually goes better if you do not. The normal order is the shared accounts first, because those are the ones nobody can currently account for, then the finance and administrative logins, then everything personal. Most of the risk sits in the first group and most of the volume sits in the last.

Often, and it is real work rather than a tidy up. We read what is there, find the credentials that are shared with no owner, identify the accounts belonging to people who have left, and rotate what needs rotating. Expect that last part to be the bulk of it. Inherited vaults are usually accurate about what exists and silent about who still has it.

Two to four weeks for most businesses, and longer where the shared logins need rotating as they go. The vault structure is a day or two of thinking and an afternoon of building. The time goes on getting every person to actually move, and on the credentials tied to a phone number or a personal email somewhere.

Possibly nothing, and that is a fine answer. Somebody who owns this properly will do it better than a monthly retainer, because they are there every day. The question is whether it is actually on their list. Password hygiene is the work that is always reasonable to do next week.

Two cases, and both are common. If your company already runs on Microsoft or Google identity and everything of value sits behind single sign on, a shared vault is a smaller problem than it looks and the money is better spent on conditional access. And if you are under about six people who all trust each other, buy Bitwarden and set yourself a reminder to revisit it at twenty.

We will say so before taking your money. Often the real problem is that nobody knows which systems exist, or that four people share one email account, or that the leaving process has no technical step in it at all. Those are worth fixing first, and a vault will not fix any of them.

One published monthly plan, from $250 a month and priced by hours of Zoho work rather than by users, and it does not move with headcount. Your Zoho Vault subscription is separate, you buy it from Zoho, and it stays in your name.

Cancel any time and the service runs to the last business day of that month. Everything stays exactly where it is, because the subscription was always yours. We hand back the administrator seat, write up the structure and the sharing rules so the next person is not guessing, and list the credentials we would rotate on the way out.

A rough headcount, including the people who need an account but are not employees, and an honest list of the shared logins you can think of. That second list is never complete and does not need to be. It tells us the shape of the problem, and our review once you sign up finds the rest.