Best Free Password Managers: What You Get for Nothing
Two are free with no catch. Five more are free with a real limit — devices, items, or features — honestly explained so you know what you're trading away.
Published September 29, 2026· By Juan Martinez
“Free password manager” covers two different products. One is software with no paid tier to unlock — the free version is the whole thing. The other is a paid product with its free plan capped somewhere: device count, item count, or a feature list, and the cap decides whether the free plan is a working tool or a trial you’re expected to outgrow. Aggregator lists collapse both into one ranking. This one splits them, then says exactly what each cap costs.
Genuinely Free: No Functional Limits
Bitwarden
No cap on devices, passwords, passkeys, or aliases
Cloud or self-hosted
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Bitwarden’s free plan carries unlimited devices and unlimited stored passwords, and it does not hold back passkey management or email-alias integration for paying users either — both work on free without a quota. Hosting is a choice rather than a tier: use Bitwarden’s own cloud (EU or US region) or run the server yourself on your own hardware, and self-hosting is available to free accounts too. The code is fully open source, and the service has been through an independent audit every year since 2018. Bitwarden has been around since 2016, which matters mostly because the free plan’s shape has survived that long without being cut back.
KeePassXC
No paid tier exists — the free version is the whole product
Local vault, no cloud sync
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KeePassXC is free in the plainer sense: no paid tier exists at all. There is no upsell screen because there is nothing above the version you download — the whole product is free permanently. Your vault is a .kdbx file on disk, with no server, no account, and no company positioned to impose a limit later. The trade-off is convenience, not money. There is no built-in sync between devices, so you arrange it yourself — put the file in whatever cloud storage you already use (Dropbox, Google Drive, Nextcloud) or move it manually. It has been developed since 2016, is fully open source, and earned ANSSI CSPN certification in 2025.
Neither of these has anything to unlock. Bitwarden keeps its free plan functionally complete as a deliberate product decision rather than trimming it to drive upgrades; KeePassXC has no tiers to sell in the first place, because a local file with no service attached leaves nothing to meter.
Free With a Catch: What Each Limit Actually Costs You
The five products below all cap their free plans, but along different axes — how many devices you can use, how many items you can store, or which features are switched off. Those are not interchangeable restrictions, and which one hurts depends entirely on how you intend to use the thing.
| Password Manager | Rating | From | Free Plan's Strong Side |
|---|---|---|---|
| Proton Pass | 8.5 | $4.99/mo | Unlimited devices/logins; 10 aliases, no built-in 2FA, 2 vaults |
| RoboForm | 7.4 | $2.49/mo | Unlimited passwords; single device, no sync |
| Enpass | 6.8 | $1.99/mo | 25 items total, any number of devices |
| NordPass | 7.3 | $2.99/mo | One active session on one device at a time |
| LastPass | 6.0 | $3.00/mo | One device category only — computer or mobile, not both |
Proton Pass gives free accounts unlimited devices plus unlimited logins, notes, and cards — the most permissive device policy in this group, and enough to actually run it across every phone, laptop, and tablet you own without paying. The cap lands on features instead: 10 hide-my-email aliases, no built-in TOTP authenticator, two vaults, and 1 GB of file storage. If you don’t use aliases and keep your two-factor codes in a separate app, very little of that free-plan ceiling touches daily use. Fully open source, launched in 2023, operated from Switzerland under the Proton Foundation.
RoboForm inverts Proton Pass’s trade-off. Stored passwords are unlimited on free — no item ceiling at all — but the free plan runs on a single device with no sync between devices whatsoever. It is a single-machine tool, which is workable if your passwords live on one desktop and nowhere else, and useless the moment you want them on a phone. RoboForm dates to 2000, making it the original password manager, and while the code is closed source, Secfault Security ran an independent penetration test in 2025 with a public report.
Enpass caps items rather than devices: 25 entries, permanently, however many machines you install it on. The architecture is bring-your-own-cloud — your vault sits in storage you already control (Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud, and others) or stays entirely offline with local Wi-Fi sync between your own devices. So Enpass doesn’t restrict how your vault syncs even on the free plan, only how much it can hold, and 25 items is a small enough number that most people hit it during setup. Closed source, with PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA512 at 320,000 iterations.
NordPass has the tightest device restriction here: one active session on one device at a time. You may install the app on as many devices as you like, but being logged in on your phone and your laptop simultaneously is not possible — signing in on one signs you out of the other. Data Breach Scanner, Password Health, the authenticator, and file attachments are all paid-tier features. Closed source, launched in 2019, built on XChaCha20-Poly1305.
LastPass draws its line around device categories. The free plan makes you pick one type and stay there: computers (browser extensions plus the desktop app) or mobile (phones and tablets), never both. That is a different constraint from NordPass’s — not a limit on simultaneous sessions, but on which class of hardware your vault exists on at all, so switching later means switching your whole setup. LastPass is also the one product in this roundup with a confirmed breach: in 2022, attackers took encrypted vaults along with some unencrypted metadata. That belongs in any assessment of the company, though it is a trust question rather than a free-plan question, and this article is about free plans. Founded 2008, closed source apart from its CLI.
Keeper is absent from this list on purpose. Its free plan is technically limited rather than nonexistent, but the limits stack: one device and 10 stored records. Ten records does not cover one person’s real accounts, so the free plan functions as a look-around before purchase rather than something you could run on. That is a statement about the free tier only — Keeper as a paid product is a different discussion, and this article’s subject is free plans people can genuinely live inside.
Which One Should You Pick
If you want a free plan with no functional ceiling and you’re comfortable either using someone’s cloud or running your own server, Bitwarden is the straightforward answer. If you’d rather have no company in the chain at all and will set up sync yourself, KeePassXC. If you need your vault on every device you own for free and don’t care about email aliases or a built-in authenticator, Proton Pass. If everything happens on one machine but you have hundreds of logins, RoboForm’s unlimited-items-single-device shape fits where the others don’t — and if you’re choosing between NordPass, Enpass, and LastPass on free alone, check which cap you’d hit first: simultaneous sessions, 25 items, or picking desktop over mobile for good.