Dropbox from April will offer the password manager to all its users, even those with a free plan, but the new feature will have a big limitation.
With the boom of cyber-attacks we've been witnessing in recent months, it's now clear to everyone that using strong and ever-changing passwords, and managing them with a good password manager, is the golden rule to sleep (a little more) soundly after surfing the Internet and using our favorite mobile apps.
The market for password managers, i.e. software that collects all our passwords in a single safe and inserts them for us when needed, has in fact been on the move for a few months. The first sign was the change in the offer of LastPass, probably the most famous password manager together with 1Password. Then, in August last year, the well-known cloud hosting platform Dropbox included a password manager in all its paid plans. Now Dropbox itself announces that this password manager will be offered to free customers as well, that is, to anyone who has a Dropbox account: over 600 million users worldwide, about 14 million paying ones. Dropbox's free password manager, however, has a big limitation.
Dropbox Password Manager: the offer for free customers
The free version of Dropbox's Password Manager will be launched in April and will offer the same encryption as the paid version, meaning that passwords and login data for websites and apps will be protected and accessible only to users.
There will be the ever-present extension for major browsers, which will fill in the login data for us whenever it is needed to enter an online account. The offer of Dropbox, therefore, is in line with that of the main competitors.
The big limit, indeed very big, of the free version will be the fact that you can store only 50 passwords: those who need to save more will have to switch to a paid Dropbox plan. Today 50 passwords are a very stringent limit for the average user, who logs in to dozens of sites and apps.
Dropbox Password Manager: password sharing
One of the positive features of Dropbox's free Password Manager, however, is the ability to share passwords with other users. It will be useful, for example, to share the password of Netflix or other streaming platforms.