So, I Upgraded to 1Password 8

Back on August 18 2021 I wrote an article about the next version of 1Password.

In that article I talked about my journey from encrypted spreadsheets, to using KeePass, to eventually biting the bullet to purchase into 1Password and falling in love with it.

I also talk about how the move from 1Password 7 to the ground-up redeveloped 1Password 8 beta was a move in a direction that angered a lot of existing users.

Gone was the native app, in it’s place is an electron-based UI which didn’t feel quite right.

No longer could we have iCloud or Dropbox synced offline password vaults as the entire model has changed to purely online.

Finally, we long-term 1Password customers who preferred a lifetime payment for the software were up in arms as we were being forced into an annual subscription. Just like we’d suffered with other software offerings we had come to rely on daily.

We were being asked to pay a fee for fewer features, a non-native app, and a forever subscription.

My fellow customers and I felt betrayed, even angry.

Here was the one company we thought would never do this to us. Our last bastion of hope dashed on the rocks of subscription fees and popular software practices.

The most surprising thing about that article?

I WAS WRONG.

Today marks my first day as a newly minted 1Password subscriber.

The Broken Promise

I was so against this change that for the past two months I’ve downloaded and evaluated around ten other tools. All to see what I might have been missing while 1Password had pulled the rug out from under me.

But while I was looking at the competitors, I forgot one simple truth:

Agile Bits isn’t in the game to charge customers for half-baked software, on the contrary, their software has always been excellent—tested, reliable, and affordable.

So headlong into the depths I dove. Choice of password managers is a highly personal thing. Some people demand open source, others demand features that suit their lifestyles.

With so many boxes to tick it soon became an enormous task to find a tool that was good for me—while being secure, and with a workflow that didn’t feel like I had to submit to a seventy-five point biometric scan while blindfolded and still able to give the secret knock every time I wanted to look at my password vault.

I’m not going to spend time reviewing any of the alternatives I looked at while on my quest, suffice to say that today there are A LOT of options out there.

Some have quirky unique features for specific use cases, some are incredibly basic but entirely open sourced, many are combinations of both, but one thing stood out while I was testing.

They all had peculiarities which I’d have to live with if I switched. At the very least these would be inconveniences, at most they were outright dealbreakers—and it wasn’t always the software.

What stood out—and from more than a few alternative offerings—were more than concerning company practices.

Inconsistent messaging about how their technology worked, what their business stood for, and even forum posts downright complaining about users not understanding how to use the tool they’d developed.

Feeling defeated I let it go. I stopped looking into alternative tools and resigned to use 1Password 7 until they pried it from my cold fingers.

The Moment I Changed

Late last week I received an email about an old service I once used. It had recently had its user database compromised.

Once again I had to spend some quality time with 1Password to check if I’d reused the password on multiple sites back in the day when I used secure spreadsheets to manage my login information.

Luckily, my practices were still pretty good even in those days. I hadn’t reused the password anywhere else, but it was the ease that I could check which reconnected me to the reasons I started using a password manager in the first place.

Which leads me back to the 1Password 8 Beta.

My Thoughts Undone

Was it actually all that bad? Was there really any reason to be annoyed in the first place? Should I be levelling daggers at the developers?

At the end of the day, not at all. Once I’d looked into the other offerings in the market, and their companies, the answer to me was clear.

In my history of using 1Password it has always been one of the most—if not the most—reliable pieces of software I use daily.

Agile Bits has regularly gone out of their way not only to be a good company, but generally be a good citizen of the internet.

To continue the conversation about digital security and guidance of good practices, but also to help their communities where they can.

With this in mind, and my recent password experiences, I was able to move past my own concerns and solve the one issue I would have been left with… not having a reliable password manager.

So here I am, repping for 1Password again.

Now being able to more objectively look at the 1Password 8 beta and see how it operates in my browser, I can safely say this is shaping up to be the best release of the software I already love…

…and honestly, I couldn’t be happier.