On Password Management (and Brand Loyalty)

I recently started looking into the Family/Team/Group tiers of the various password management apps to help bring someone I love 😘into the 21st century and off the hand-written-on-a-sheet-of-paper password system.

In doing so, I discovered that LastPass actually “won out”, having all of the features I need, plus being less expensive than the app I’d been using for years, 1Password.

I was going to save… Dollars!

Migration between the two services didn’t look like much of a headache, so I was feeling all but ready to make the switch, until… I happened to notice in the support portal for LastPass that they are “a LogMeIn company“. Hmm.

LogMeIn isn’t a company I use or know much about, but I’ve heard/seen their ads, and they seem to be a larger/more corporate-y company. Which isn’t necessarily a “bad” thing. But seeing that reminded me of the emails that I’d been getting semi-regularly from Dave and Sara Teare, the husband and wife founders of 1Password.

And now I recognize that those emails were often trying to sell me something or get me to upgrade my app, but they were also thoughtful, personal, and funny. And the more I clicked around the two sites, the more that contrast between the apps & companies seemed to grow.

The “people-side” of these apps (Who’s the founder, owner? What’s the company culture like? How many people work there? Where is the company based?) isn’t something that’s ever researched/included in side-by-side feature comparison charts of these tech review articles. It might be subjective, and hard to quantify. But it’d be interesting to see more of.

Anyway, I’m glad I took a moment to weigh those factors against my usual tendency to go with whatever’s cheapest. I’m sticking with 1Password, and look forward to their emails. 😆