I’ve been at odds with my password manager for a while now. This should come as no surprise to anyone who also been down this path. A long time 1Password 6/7 user, who been on version 8 for far too long.

Version 7 was fantastic, highly polished, and truly felt “made for Mac”. Version 8, is just another electron app.

To be fair, they did add some nice features to 8. Things like SSH key management, and passkeys. But they also took a lot away. Big things like local vaults, and one time payment options. Now you have to use their cloud, and subscribe.

The cloud thing didn’t really bother me. 1Password uses more than just your master password to encrypt your stuff. You also need a long secret key. And the subscription didn’t bug me that much either, as I was (didn’t have any other options anymore) using their cloud to sync.

The big issue I have with 1Password 8, is that it has had some long standing bugs¹, and a browser extension that would have a seizure upon opening. Overall, a slow but steady decline in quality, with the gull to up the price.

So I started thinking. What do I want to move to.

Decisions Decisions

There are a lot of options out there. So I had to start narrowing things down. My main criteria were:

1. Not electron
2. Not sketchy

Not electron ruled out a number off the bat. And not sketchy ruled out more. But I had a thought.

While looking around, I realized I was only thinking of the big, cloud providers. Things like Bitwarden, Lastpass, nordpass, dashlane, etc. But what about something more, standard, more interchangeable, more portable.

KeePass

I’ve known about KeePass/KeePassXC for quite awhile, and have even used it for some things. I just didn’t realize how much of a thriving ecosystem there is around it. A whole bunch of different clients, all reading and writing to the same DB format, kdbx.

The main thing I wanted was good syncing to my phone, and again, not electron. StrongBox looked like my answer. Made natively for Mac and iOS, and sync through a provider of my choice (iCloud, iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google, SFTP, etc). So I installed it, and started to migrate.

Apparently Apple added some password management migration middleware to iOS at some point. This actually made moving really simple. Just a couple taps, and I was 95% moved. I just had to manually copy attachments, and my SSH keys. Everything else (including passkeys) moved perfectly.

Living With It

So far everything is going pretty smoothly. StrongBox doesn’t have a safari extension, but integrates with macOS’ autofill system, it works pretty well. One thing I noticed after uninstalling 1Password and its extension from my iPhone, my battery life went way up. I normally ended the day at around 10-20%. Now (with no other changes in use) I end at around 40%. And looking around online, I’m not the only one.

So yeah, I’m happy. A native app, with control over how I sync my DB. And while StrongBox is a paid program, it has both a long trail period, and a one time purchase option.