Are you buying for yourself or for a team? They are different products.
A personal password manager optimises for one person's convenience: autofill that works everywhere, sync across devices, a generator, breach alerts. Proton Pass and NordPass are built this way, and both have free tiers you can live on.
A team password manager optimises for something else entirely — who has access to what, who granted it, who revoked it, and what happens when someone leaves. Passbolt was designed for that from day one, with groups, role-based access control, folders organised by department or project, comments for context and an activity log for accountability. Uniqkey is built for the same buyer with SSO and team management, priced per user.
Retrofitting either direction goes badly. A consumer manager with a "family plan" bolted on does not give an IT team the audit trail it needs. Passbolt, conversely, says plainly that its team focus makes it less suitable for individual use.
heylogin sits across both: a free tier for individuals and a business tier from about €2.50 per user per month, with team sharing built in.
What happens when the master password is the single point of failure?
Everything in a conventional password manager depends on one secret. Forget it and the vault is gone; have it stolen and the vault is open. That is the design of Proton Pass, NordPass, Uniqkey and Passbolt, and it is why every one of them warns about recovery configuration.
heylogin removes the secret. Instead of memorising a master password, your smartphone is the authentication device: a login request appears on the phone and you approve it with a fingerprint, face or PIN. The factors become something you have and something you are, rather than something you know and can forget.
The trade is that you have moved the single point of failure rather than eliminated it. Losing the phone matters more than it did, so multi-device setup is not optional. What you gain is that a phishing page cannot capture a master password that does not exist, and no amount of social engineering extracts a memory nobody holds.
For a team, the operational argument is stronger still: onboarding does not require teaching people to construct and remember a strong master password, which is the step where most credential hygiene programmes quietly fail.
Does open source matter more here than elsewhere?
Yes, because the client is what handles your keys. In a zero-knowledge design the server only ever sees ciphertext, so the entire security claim rests on code running on your own device — and closed-source code means taking the vendor's word for what it does with the master key.
Proton Pass and Passbolt both publish their source. Passbolt goes further and builds on OpenPGP, a cryptographic standard that has been examined for decades rather than a bespoke scheme, with independently published audit reports.
NordPass, Uniqkey and heylogin are not open source. NordPass mitigates this with independent security audits, which is a real but weaker assurance: an audit examines a snapshot, while published source can be examined by anyone at any time.
This is not a reason to dismiss the closed-source options — Nord Security has a clean record and Uniqkey is built for a compliance buyer who cares about certification more than source access. But if two products are otherwise equal, published source is the tiebreaker in this category more than in any other.
Why do email aliases belong in a password manager?
Because half of a credential is the username, and for most services the username is your email address. Rotating passwords perfectly while handing the same address to two hundred services leaves a permanent identifier that ties those accounts together and follows you through every breach.
Proton Pass is the only manager in this category that closes that gap. When signing up for a service you generate a unique alias that forwards to your real inbox; the free tier includes 10 aliases and Pass Plus makes them unlimited. If an alias starts receiving spam you know exactly which service leaked it, and disabling it costs nothing.
The practical effect is compartmentalisation that actually gets used. Alias systems that live in a separate product get abandoned within a month because generating one is an extra step at exactly the wrong moment; inside the password manager, it happens in the same dialogue as the generated password.
It works with any email address rather than requiring Proton Mail, though the integration is tighter if you use both.
What should a European team actually check before rolling one out?
Where the vault is stored, and under which law. Uniqkey stores exclusively in Danish data centres and was designed around GDPR from the architecture up rather than adapted to it — which is the distinction a European compliance officer is actually asking about. Passbolt offers an EU cloud or self-hosting on Linux with documented Docker and Kubernetes deployment. heylogin hosts in Germany. Proton Pass is Swiss, covered by an adequacy decision rather than intra-EEA processing.
Then check the leaving process, because it is where credential management fails. When an employee departs, someone has to revoke every shared credential they could see and rotate the ones that matter. Passbolt's role-based access control and activity log make that a defined procedure; a consumer manager with shared folders makes it a memory exercise.
Then check the integrations you depend on. Uniqkey includes SSO, which changes what the password manager even needs to cover. Passbolt exposes an API for automation, which matters if credentials feed deployment pipelines.
And check autofill against your own critical applications before committing. Proton Pass and Passbolt both acknowledge browser-extension autofill issues on complex sites, and a manager that fails on the one internal application everybody uses daily will be worked around within a week.
