Finding the best password manager isn’t an easy task, especially if you’re in the business of providing cybersecurity of your own. For a long time, LastPass was our favorite password manager, but if you’ve skimmed one of our more recent Newmind newsletters, you’ll know that their company has been having a rough few months, going back to a breach that they suffered on September 22, 2022.
Right away, we shared advice to peers that might help them switch their own services, but held out hope that LastPass might remediate their situation given some time, and buy back trust. Unfortunately, their poor handling around communication and transparency regarding this breach finally led us to evaluate alternative password managers for our own team. We needed a product that was secure, trustworthy, manageable at team scale, and very easy-to-use. The product we landed on is Keeper.
Luke and Ryan spent January performing a fresh market comparison of password managers (including 1Password, Bitwarden, and others) and Keeper really stood out to us for their:
- Security design
- Management policies
- Organizational controls
- Ease of use
Their tool functions in a very similar fashion to LastPass, but ultimately they offer a much greater level of trust to us as IT providers, and that’s why we went with Keeper.
Trust is a key component to cybersecurity
“Zero-Knowledge” is an expression found among some password managers, and it means that the provider can hold on to your data (passwords, sensitive information, etc), while retaining zero access to your data from their end of the service. The information you put into the tool can theoretically only be accessed by you. Keeper doesn’t just say that their system is zero-knowledge, they publish the documentation to prove it (and a lot of this proof was missing from LastPass’ own documents).
Besides trust, Keeper also offers some things that an IT provider loves: a strong MSP program (meaning it will be easier and more reliable for us to offer this to our clients as a product), and a simple user interface that will be easy for any of our clients or team members to get comfortable with. Thankfully, it was an easy and quick transition for our team members to transfer their LastPass stored data right into Keeper.
Is it the best?
Ultimately that comes down to what your organization is looking for, but Keeper meets our requirements and most importantly, they meet our desired level of trust.
If you’re interested in making a change to Keeper, or in having Newmind help you navigate other types of change like this, we’d love to talk.
