Coming home from vacation is quite an awkward time. Especially when you just spent 10 days on a sunny Jamaican beach, and come home to subzero temperatures.
Whats even worse is getting your head back in to gear, and in to work mode. For me, this means logging in to a bunch of email and social networks accounts, as well as administration control panels. You think it’s all good, until you’ve locked yourself out of a whole bunch of sites, coz your mind is still in its zen and peaceful state, looking at blue waters and azure skies.
This is when I decided I might need a password manager.
I need something that :
- has good encryption
- can be used on multiple macs
- possibly iPhone synchronization
- can be used for more than just passwords eg: membership numbers, application serial numbers
- easy and intuitive user interface (and I’ve very critical )
A quick search on Google, Versiontracker and a few review sites, I settled on trying out 1Password by Agile Web Solutions and Wallet by Acrylic.
Both applications are very similar animals, but have very different spots. They both have excellent encryption and allow you to store and retrieve login/passwords, serial, credit card and membership numbers and iPhone synchronization. Their similarity ends there though.
Wallet
Wallet has the simpler interface that looks very similar to Apple Addressbook’s 3 column interface. It starts you off with 3 folders/categories of information (Serial Numbers, Web Passwords, Credit Cards), but you can create your own custom categories as you please.
Creating a new entry under a category is as simple as clicking the plus sign under the selected category. Creating an entry under Web Passwords gives you standard fields of Name, Username and Password. You can add additional fields if you needed, but its pretty straight forward.
When it comes to retrieving web login information, Wallet makes it easy to automatically enter your saved credentials to a site by way of a menu bar applet. Go to a site you saved the login/password for in Wallet, and click the menu bar icon. Enter the master password you setup for Wallet, and it will insert the credentials in to the web form. I haven’t had extensive use with Wallet yet to talk much about it, but since I have multiple accounts on some sites, I’m not sure how it handles that.
When it comes to synchronization, Wallet uses MobileMe or a WebDAV server to sync iPhones and multiple computers. This means thats iPhone users have cloud access to their Wallet database, and don’t need to do much to sync their information.
Wallet looks like a great app, and for the $20 price tag, is pretty reasonable. Its got good features, multiple mac and iphone sync, excellent encryption and an easy to use interface.
1Password
1Password is a pretty feature rich application. By default, it starts you off with 6 categories (Logins, Accounts, Identities, Secure Notes, Software, Wallet), and has a plethora of predefined templates for storing information including email and instant messenger setups, text notes and identity persons.
My favourite feature is the browser plugin, that saves passwords as you type them in to web logins. This makes it a lot easier to save them, as its quite cumbersome to remember all your accounts and passwords at setup time. As you go through your daily routine and come to a web login form, fill it in, and the browser plugin will as you if you want to save it to 1Password. The plugin doesn’t stop there, enter your credit card information and create a identity profile in to 1Password and you can fill in registration forms or purchase forms with a couple of clicks.
Synchronizing multiple macs and an iPhone with one database isn’t as straight forwards as entering your MobileMe credentials in Wallet. The Agile website recommends you use DropBox to keep one database synced with multiple machines. DropBox is an amazing web service, but if you don’t have one, your gonna have to get one. iPhone syncing is through wifi, which means you have to manually sync your mac with your iPhone for the latest info.
1Password looks like the more power application, with great browser integration but I wish it could sync using MobileMe giving my iPhone cloud syncing. At $39.95, its price tag is pretty steep.
Final Verdict
So far both of them seem to be very capable and excellent applications. I will be using the trial versions for the next month to really make up my mind, and will write an in depth review of both soon.
Have you used or tried any of these applications? What are your thoughts, preferences? Are there better applications out there I might have missed? Leave me your comments!
