What is a password manager? A simple explanation

What a password manager does, why one main password is enough, what happens if you lose it, and what the four managers listed here are.

Key points

A password manager creates a strong, different password for every account, stores all of them encrypted, and fills them in when you sign in.
You remember one main password instead of many. If you lose it, your passwords may be lost too.
Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) says a password manager is worthwhile in most cases, and in any case better than reusing passwords.

What a password manager does

A password manager is an app with three jobs:

It creates passwords. For every account, it makes a long random password that nobody can guess.
It stores them encrypted. All passwords sit in a vault that only your main password opens.
It fills them in. When you sign in to a website or an app, it enters the user name and password for you.

The problem it solves is reuse. If you use one password for several accounts, a leak at one website opens all of them. With a password manager, every account has its own password, and you do not need to remember any of them.

The main password

The vault is locked with one main password, often called the master password. It is the only password you still need to know, so it has to be long and used nowhere else.

The US standards body NIST says length matters more than special characters. For passwords used alone, its guideline asks for at least 15 characters. It also tells websites not to demand mixtures of character types, and to allow password managers and pasting into password fields.

Most makers cannot reset your main password, because they never know it. Bitwarden, for example, states that it “has no way to access, retrieve, or reset your master password.” The BSI warns that if you lose the main password, all data may be lost in the worst case. Each manager offers ways to prepare for this, such as a printed recovery sheet or a trusted contact.

The managers listed on this site

	Company	Free plan	Open source
1Password	AgileBits Inc., Canada	no, 14-day trial	no
Bitwarden	Bitwarden Inc., US	yes	yes
Keeper	Keeper Security, Inc., US	yes, limited to 10 records and one mobile device	partly
Proton Pass	Proton AG, Switzerland	yes	yes

The table shows what the makers state on their own pages. This site has not tested the apps.

What you can do

Choose a password manager that runs on all your devices.
Pick a long main password that you use nowhere else, for example several random words.
Turn on two-factor sign-in for the password manager itself.
Change the passwords of your most important accounts first: your email, because it can reset all others, then banking and shopping.
Prepare for a lost main password with the recovery options of your manager.

Next step

The guide Is a password manager safe? explains how the vault is protected and what the LastPass breach of 2022 showed.

The figures in this guide come from the archive and change with every data update. As of November 13, 2026.