LastPass Review

What Is LastPass?

Left to their own devices, most users are terrible at creating passwords. After all, it's a pain to remember five different passwords, let alone 10 or 20. All too often, users pick one password, then re-use it over and over. That’s highly risky – if the login data for even one of your accounts is ever stolen, then hackers have they key to all the others that share that password.

On top of this, too many users rely on classic, but easily guessable, passwords such as ‘123456',  ‘password', ‘qwerty', and variations of pets’ names or the names of family members.

LastPass can alleviate all this risk, and make it easier to manage all your various online accounts. It can auto-generate secure passwords – a unique, unguessable one for each of your online accounts – then autofill these securely as you log in. All you need to remember is one master password for your LastPass account – just make sure it’s both secure and memorable.

LastPass: The Good

LastPass is affordable, easy-to-use, and secure, making it a great choice for most users who struggle to remember dozens of different logins. The service has some great features to help along the way:

The LastPass Vault

The core of LastPass is the vault. This is where your passwords are stored. Without your master password, your vault is encrypted – it’s just a bunch of garbled data that won't make sense to anyone, even if hacked. Unlock the vault with that password, however, and your data is readable.

Passwords and account usernames are stored in the vault along with the web address (URL) used for logging in to each account. If you land on a site with one of your stored logins, Lastpass will either automatically fill in your login credentials or make them available upon request.

You can organize your login credentials into different folders such as work, home, and so on. LastPass also lets you add any notes if you need to.

Under Advanced Settings, you can adjust features, such as automatically filling out login forms, or requiring you to re-enter your master password for access to particularly sensitive logins.

The password reprompt is particularly useful if you share a PC with others. That way, no one can log in to key accounts such as your bank or email without knowing the master password – even if you're already logged into LastPass on the shared computer.

Extra Storage Options

The vault doesn't only hold passwords. It can also hold notes with information you may want to keep private. You can use this to store product licences for paid software, for example, or backup codes for two-factor authentication logins.

LastPass: The Not-So-Good

Overall, LastPass’ approach is great, but there are a few drawbacks. Re-entering your master password for added security won’t feel ideal for everyone. It can be tedious if you have to do it each time you land on a site, compared autofilled logins.

To alleviate this pain-point, only use this advanced security measure for key accounts where you feel the added hassle is worth it.

Lost connection drawback

Once you've created a new login, you can ask LastPass to generate a new password for you, and then automatically add it to the sign-up form. That's a fantastic lifesaver, but it also has one big downside – if your connection to LastPass' servers aren't working, then LastPass may not remember that it created a new password for the site.

That is really, really bad. Sure, you have a new, secure password, but you have no idea what it is. Yikes. In practice, this is unlikely to happen often. But, when it does, it's little short of infuriating.

Slow-going changing tool

Finally, the automated password changing tool is not as robust as with other services. It can only change site passwords one-by-one. Other tools, such as Dashlane can change multiple passwords at once.

In practice, this isn’t a drawback that you’re likely to encounter throughout the lifespan of your LastPass usage – it’s more of a pain point when first setting up, putting more onus on you to do a bit of manual setup.

LastPass Free vs Premium

LastPass offers a number of price ranges, including a free option.

LastPass Free

If you only want to use LastPass on a single device, such as your PC or smartphone, then you can use LastPass for free.

However, there's a limitation with this approach – very few of us use just one device these days. If you want to log into services via LastPass on both your laptop and your phone, then LastPass Free isn't the way to go. Instead, you should be thinking LastPass Premium.

LastPass Premium

If – in a more likely scenario – you want access to the same password vault across all your devices, then you need LastPass Premium, which costs $36 per year.

To set up LastPass for your entire family (up to 6 users maximum) it'll cost you double that, at $48 per year.

LastPass Enterprise

Business users, meanwhile, have the LastPass Enterprise option. For up to 50 seats you can pay $29 per user. Larger enterprises can pay $48 per user with added features, such as administrative control and the ability to monitor users' password management behavior.

LastPass vs Dashlane

Although they both offer a similar service, there are some key differences between LastPass and Dashlane.

For a start, Lastpass is the cheaper of the two, so if budget is your main concern, then this could sway you. However, we did find that Dashlane has a dedicated chat function, which you could be appealing if you come unstuck and need help.

Compare both the services in our LastPass Vs Dashlane guide.

LastPass vs 1Password

Another highly rated password manager is 1Password, a complete package that offers a lot of features designed to make password management an easy task.

1Password has some neat tricks up its sleeve, such as the ability to create multiple vaults, so that there's no crossover between your work activity and personal online life.

1Password is more expensive than LastPass (99 whole cents a month, to be precise), but we think it's worth it.

Compare both the services in our LastPass Vs 1Password guide.

Getting Started with LastPass

Using LastPass via a web browser is easy. First, you install the browser add-on from LastPass.com. The site will detect which browser you’re using and install the add-on directly. In the case of Microsoft Edge, it sends you to the browser's add-on catalog.

LastPass works with all the major browsers, including Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Opera and Safari

Once you've installed LastPass, you'll be directed to create a new account or sign-in to your existing one. If you're creating a new account, LastPass will give you some guidance on creating a new master password.

Master password setup

This step is important, since all your other passwords will be locked behind this master password. It has to be hard-to-guess for the bad guys, but easy for you to remember.

If you forget this password, you'll lose access to your entire password database and all your logins. This is why LastPass advises you to create a password that ‘tells a story unique to you’. You can merge together four or five separate words that mean something to you alone – for instance, ‘fifiatemywoolsox’, or a favourite song lyric. This should make it easier to remember, and replaces the previously popular method of creating an alpha-numeric password with six to ten random characters, symbols and numbers.

Once you have your master password, it's time to start saving all your other passwords. If you've been using another password manager or the built-in one with your browser, you should be able to import your database by clicking on the LastPass icon in your browser and going to More options > Advanced > Import.

The Verdict

Overall, LastPass is a great choice. It's well-priced, it works with nearly every device you'll need it for, and it's very secure. The service's automated password changer could be a little more convenient, but the pros certainly outweigh the cons and we'd readily recommend using LastPass rather than trying to remember all your passwords yourself.