Top KeePass Alternatives

Good: Open source, easy to use and totally free. Plenty of plugins to extend features.Open source, easy to use and totally free. Plenty of plugins to extend features.

Things to Improve: Mac and Linux versions can be used under Mono or Wine.

Overall: A very powerful password manager for all tech savvy people.

Introduction:

Passwords have become a big hassle of digital life. So many sites, so many passwords. Keep them simple and you get hacked, keep them difficult and you forget them. Fortunately, password managers can ease the pain. So here we're going to review a popular open source password manager named KeePass. Let's see how powerful it is and whether you should go for it or not:

Total Control Over Your Security

One major upside of using KeePass instead of other password managers is that it gives you total control over your security. Other popular password managers don't, and that is because of two reasons:

• First is that KeePass is open source, so anyone can see its functionality to ensure that it uses appropriate measures to keep people's passwords safe.
• Another major reason is it keeps your passwords in your computer only - not in someone else's cloud, so you'll be safe from mass attacks that make other password managers (and their users) vulnerable. For instance, LastPass recently suffered from such an attack and it quickly asked its users to change their master passwords after it found about it. You'll be secured from that kind of mess and to steal your passwords someone will have to attack your particular computer.

However, full control also comes with major responsibility. For any reason if you fail to protect your computer and are targeted by some (not so) decent human beings, then you can imagine what can they do to your online life (and also to your offline life because the two are very intertwined these days).

With that in mind, lets see other aspects of its functionality.

Starting Up

Getting started with KeePass is easy. You just download a small package from their website keepass.info, install it, launch it and it's very easy from there. First thing you'll have to do is making a new database file and save it from any name of your choice. You can have any number of databases. You can also open multiple databases in a tabbed user-interface.

Once a database is set up, you can start adding password entries to it manually. If you were expecting deeper browser integration like LastPass, LogMeOnce and other popular password mangers, then this is a disappointment.

Importing Passwords

If you're coming to KeePass from any other password manager (LastPass, for instance), you can import your passwords. The importer is fairly simple and you'll get an idea of how to use it in first few minutes - you select Import option from File menu, choose the file format, select your password file and a new wizard pops up to help you import your passwords. In the wizard first of all you're asked to choose the right kind of encoding for your file (along with text preview). Then you can specify the format of your file on next screen and then when you click next it'll show you a preview of data before importing it. If you see your sites, usernames and passwords listed as they should be, you can import them. It's fairly simple, and if you're even a little tech savvy and have ever imported CSV files then you'll get its idea in less than 10 minutes.

However, depending on your password manager this can also be a little tricky. But that's not the fault of KeePass - that's the trick of other password managers to keep you attached to them.

So if you too encounter this problem, save your password content in a plain text file and try importing the file by choosing Generic CSV Importer in KeePass.

Using it

Using KeePass is fairly simple, as long as you're willing to keep it open. Since there's no browser integration, it won't enter your passwords automatically as soon as you load a website. However, it can certainly enter your passwords in the forms if you tell it to do so. Just load the login page of site, search for the entry of website that you've loaded and after selecting that entry hit Cntrl+V on your keyboard. That's it - it'll log you in by entering your username and password automatically in the form fields.

However, unlike other password managers that sit in background and do the job you'll have to keep it open on side. Fortunately, it can be minimized to a tray icon to ease that distraction.

It has also got a very good password generator under Tools menu, and that too is fairly easy to use.

Conclusion

For any experienced tech savvy user who wants total control over his security there's no option better than this one I'd say. If you belong to that crowd, go for it. Once you get comfortable with it, you'll fall in love with it.