Best European Alternatives to LastPass

Why people leave LastPass

Nobody leaves LastPass over a feature. They leave because of one week in December 2022, when the company confirmed that attackers had copied backups of customer vault data from cloud storage after a developer's machine was compromised in August.

It is worth being exact about what that means, because both the panic and the reassurance are usually overstated. The sensitive fields — usernames, passwords, secure notes, form fill — were AES-256 encrypted and stayed that way. What was not encrypted was the metadata around them, including the website URLs, so whoever holds a copy knows every service each customer had an account with.

The structural problem is that the copy is permanent. You can change every password in the vault and you cannot un-copy the file, so the encrypted half is protected for as long as your master password holds out against offline guessing at whatever iteration count your account happened to be on at the time. That is not a risk you manage; it is a risk you either accept or leave behind.

• A copy of your vault exists and always will This is the difference between the LastPass incident and an ordinary breach. Nothing you do now changes what an attacker already has, and the only variable left is how expensive your master password is to guess. Every alternative on this page is a way of changing that arithmetic: by not storing your vault with a third party at all, or by not having a master password to guess.
• The URL list was never encrypted LastPass's own notice lists unencrypted fields alongside the encrypted ones, and website URLs are among them. That is a map of where each customer banks, which brokers they use and which internal systems their employer runs, and it is useful to a phishing operation without decrypting anything. Password rotation does nothing about it.
• American company, no published European region LastPass US LP is in Boston, so the CLOUD Act reaches it regardless of where servers happen to sit. Its own security documentation describes vault data as held on servers in the cloud and names no region, and there is no European residency option advertised on any plan. Where 1Password lets you pick an EU region, here there is nothing to pick. The privacy policy does name LastPass Ireland Limited in Dublin as the controller for customers in the EEA, which settles who you contract with — it is not a place your vault is kept, and the same policy says data is processed in the United States and other countries.
• The free plan is a single device type The free tier is restricted to one device type: computers or phones, not both. That has been the arrangement for years and it is still on the pricing page today. Proton Pass's free tier covers unlimited devices and heylogin runs a free tier as well, so for a household that never intended to pay, the gap is not subtle.

What you have to replace, not just match

Before shortlisting anything, separate the two problems the 2022 incident left you with, because different tools answer different ones.

The first is custody: your vault was held by a provider, backed up by that provider, and taken from that provider. The second is the master password, which is the single secret standing between a stolen copy and its contents.

Passbolt answers the first by letting you keep the server. heylogin answers the second by removing the master password from the design altogether. Proton Pass and NordPass answer neither structurally and instead offer the ordinary thing — a better-run provider in a better jurisdiction — which for most households is the honest, proportionate choice.

The alternatives compared

How each alternative compares to LastPass

What actually breaks when you switch

The export is a plain-text CSV and people leave it in Downloads. Put it on an encrypted disk, import it, verify a handful of entries by actually signing in, then delete it and empty the bin. This is the single most common way a careful migration creates a worse exposure than the one it was fleeing.

Shared folders do not come with you. In LastPass they belong to whoever created them, so your own export contains what you own and nothing else. Ask each owner to export separately before anyone cancels, because a departed colleague's shared folder is unrecoverable once the account lapses.

And sequence the master-password reset. Everyone moving needs a new secret on the new manager while the old one still works, and autofill will misbehave for a week on sites where both extensions are installed. Run the two side by side for a fortnight, then remove the LastPass extension deliberately rather than letting people decide individually.

If my vault was copied in 2022, is changing passwords enough?

It protects the accounts themselves and it does not undo the exposure. Rotating every credential means a decrypted copy of the old vault yields dead passwords, which is the main thing, and it is worth doing before anything else.

What rotation cannot touch is the unencrypted metadata. The URL list in that backup still describes which services you hold accounts with, and that remains accurate however many times you change the passwords behind it. Treat targeted phishing that names your actual bank and your actual payroll provider as a live possibility rather than a generic warning.

The other thing rotation cannot fix is the master password, because the copied file is decrypted with a key derived from it. If your master password was short, reused, or set years ago when your account was on a lower iteration count, the sensible reading is that the vault will eventually open, and moving is the only response that matters.

Has LastPass fixed the encryption since then?

It has raised the cost of guessing substantially. LastPass documents PBKDF2-SHA256 with 600,000 iterations for deriving the key from the master password, which is above the current OWASP recommendation and roughly six times the 100,100 it was running when the backups were taken.

That matters for vaults going forward and it does not retroactively protect the copies already in circulation, which were made under the old parameters. This is the part most write-ups get wrong in one direction or the other: the current product is not weakly hashed, and the 2022 copies are not protected by that improvement.

So if you are asking whether LastPass is badly engineered today, the answer is no. If you are asking whether your particular vault is still exposed, the answer depends entirely on what your account looked like in December 2022.

Does any of these stop the same thing happening again?

Only one changes the structure. Passbolt self-hosted means there is no provider holding a backup of your vault, so the specific failure — a third party's cloud storage being read by someone who compromised a third party's engineer — has no equivalent. The failure it substitutes is your own backup hygiene, which is a risk you can at least see.

heylogin changes a different variable. With no master password, a stolen copy of encrypted material has no memorable secret behind it to grind against; the key sits on a phone protected by a fingerprint or face. The trade is that losing the phone matters much more, so a second device is not optional.

Proton Pass and NordPass are conventional zero-knowledge managers hosted by a European company. They are better-run and better-situated than LastPass, and if one of them were breached the same way, you would be in the same position. That is a fair trade for most people; it is not a structural fix and this page will not call it one.

Does leaving cost more than staying?

Usually less. NordPass Premium is about €1.49 a month and Proton Pass Plus about €1.99, both of which undercut LastPass Premium. The free tiers are not equivalent, though: Proton Pass Free covers unlimited devices, while NordPass keeps access on multiple devices for Premium — so of the two it is Proton Pass, not NordPass, that actually removes the restriction you are leaving.

For a business the comparison is closer and turns on what you need. Passbolt Pro is about €4 per user per month with a free Community Edition underneath it, and heylogin Business from about €2.50 per user per month, against LastPass Teams and Business tiers billed annually per seat.

The cost that is real and rarely counted is the master-password reset for everyone. Moving a family or a team means each person creating a new secret and each person's autofill breaking for a week, and that is where these migrations stall rather than in the export file.

Which one to pick

If the vault you held in December 2022 still contains passwords you have not rotated, stop reading comparison pages and rotate them, starting with email. The choice of replacement is the second decision, not the first.

For a household or a small team, Proton Pass is the move: Swiss, open source, a free tier that works on everything you own, and aliases that break the address-to-service link that leaked. NordPass is the cheaper option and just as sensible, provided you have read what it says about running on AWS.

If your conclusion from 2022 was that a provider should not be holding everyone's vault in one place, a self-hosted Passbolt is the one option here that acts on it, and it acts on it properly — provided somebody takes ownership of the backups that become yours.

And if your conclusion was that a memorised master password is the thing that will eventually fail, heylogin removes it instead of hardening it. That is a more radical answer than any iteration count, and for a team it is easier to roll out than it sounds.