Steganos Password Manager

Steganos Password Manager keeps the vault as an encrypted file on your machine and leaves the syncing to you: it works with no cloud at all, or through your own Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, Google Drive or MagentaCLOUD account, with the data encrypted on your devices before it leaves them.

That is the KeePass arrangement with a commercial product around it, at €29.99 a year against a €39.99 list price, with a 30-day trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee. The platforms named are Windows, iOS and Android.

Steganos Software GmbH sits at Rüppurrer Straße 1a in Karlsruhe, registered at Amtsgericht Mannheim under HRB 758 458 with Patrick Heise as managing director, and dates itself to 1997 in Frankfurt am Main.

The ownership takes a second look: that address and that managing director are also Nero AG's, whose imprint gives HRB 362519 Mannheim and the same CEO, and the Steganos shop sells Nero products alongside its own.

Neither site states the group relationship, and Nero AG — a German company with offices in Glendale, California and Hangzhou — does not publish its ultimate shareholders. For a directory whose first question is who owns the vendor, that is unresolved rather than damning.

The rest of the qualifications follow the price. No independent certification is stated on the pages checked, and the source is closed, so there is no external assurance of either kind. Three of the four supported sync services are American, and a European buyer who takes that route has moved the ciphertext onto US infrastructure by choice — MagentaCLOUD, from Deutsche Telekom, is the one option that does not. The pricing page does not say whether €29.99 includes VAT.

What Steganos Password Manager does well

• Works with no cloud at all: the vault is a local encrypted file
• Sync runs through an account you already have, encrypted on your devices first
• MagentaCLOUD from Deutsche Telekom is available as a German sync option
• €29.99 a year against a €39.99 list price, with a 30-day trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee
• German company in Karlsruhe, registered at HRB 758 458, trading since 1997

Where Steganos Password Manager falls short

• The ownership is unclear: the address, managing director and shop are shared with Nero AG, the relationship is stated nowhere and Nero AG's ultimate shareholders are not published
• Three of the four sync services offered are American
• No independent certification stated on the pages checked, and the source is closed
• The named platforms are Windows, iOS and Android
• The price does not state whether VAT is included

Standout feature. You pick the cloud, or none: Steganos is the only paid product here that never asks you to store the vault anywhere the vendor chose — and the only one whose corporate parentage you cannot establish from its own pages.