NordPass vs. LastPass

Key Similarities:

• Both services give you 30 days of access to their premium plans without handing over a credit card
• Both services let you add up to six people on their family accounts
• Both services scan the dark web and alert you if your details appear

Key Differences:

• It was easier to upload our login details to NordPass
• LastPass’ paid plans are more expensive
• NordPass has a 30-day money-back guarantee

In our latest Password Manager Industry Report, we learned that 1 in 3 Americans use password managers. That’s up from 1 in 5 in 2022. It also revealed that 71 percent of respondents without a password manager are open to signing up for one in the future. Let’s take a look at two of the best password managers — NordPass and LastPass.

With both options, you can sign up for a free plan without using a credit card and store all the passwords you use today. But we think spending an extra couple of dollars a month for NordPass’ premium plan is a good investment. In this article, we’ll not only lay out why we think NordPass is worth the money, but also why it’s the better password manager.

Methodology

We start every comparison with a research session. It usually begins on the company’s website. We’ll dive into their history and find what makes them tick. At the same time, we’re taking notes on any claims they make about their products. We also visit customer review websites and forums to learn what people think about the product and the technical issues they’ve experienced. It’s also good to see how the companies respond to criticisms.

We then buy the products and test them ourselves. We install them on multiple devices, including laptops and smartphones, so we can integrate them into our daily routines. The goal is to see how well they complement our work and personal lives. We’ll then draw comparisons to the company’s claims and confirm the tools work as promised. Once we’ve finished that thorough examination, we decide which product to recommend.

Now that you know how it all works, let’s learn why we chose NordPass over LastPass.

Security

NordPass and LastPass take very different approaches to securing and encrypting your data. The only similarity they share is the use of the zero-knowledge architecture principle. That means no one from NordPass or LastPass can view your master password, which you use to log in to their apps and the vaults where all your data is stored. It also means that even though your passwords are stored with them, they couldn’t see anything even if they wanted to.

Both also use encryption, but their encryption methods differ. We know — cryptography terms make our eyes glaze over too. But bear with us. Your password security is important, so it’s vital that you know how each password manager encrypts your passwords.

NordPass Encryption

Let’s start with NordPass, which uses the XChaCha20 encryption standard. The easiest way to explain it is that it scrambles your data one piece at a time in a continuous stream. While it’s processing, the algorithm adds a unique stamp, called a nonce, to every piece of data to make it more secure.

The benefits of using XChaCha20 are that it’s faster to implement than other encryption algorithms and doesn’t require hardware support. It’s considered the future of encryption, and it’s currently used by companies such as Google and Cloudflare.

LastPass Encryption

LastPass uses AES 256-bit encryption, which other top password managers, such as 1Password and Dashlane, use. Instead of scrambling one piece of data at a time in a continuous stream, AES 256-bit breaks down the information into blocks and encrypts each of them separately. It often needs a lot of hardware support for the best performance, which means it can be slower to process data. On the bright side, though, it’s secure.

Before we move on, we need to talk about LastPass’ data breaches. It uses top-of-the-line data encryption, but the company has been hacked three times. The last incident happened in 2022 and resulted in encrypted and unencrypted customer data being stolen. To date, NordPass has not been hacked. Despite using a different encryption method, we feel more comfortable handing our passwords over to NordPass.

Winner: NordPass

Pricing

NordPass and LastPass have free, premium and family plans. We’ve put each plan side by side so it’s easier to compare them. Let’s start with the free tiers.

NordPass and LastPass have two of the best free password manager plans around. You don’t need to use your credit card to sign up for an account, and they’ll even let you try the premium features for 30 days. LastPass includes some extra features, such as password health assessments and dark web monitoring, but we are surprised they don’t let you access live chat support.

We love a free meal as much as the next person, but we recommend spending the extra few dollars once your 30 days are up. Here’s what you’ll get if you pay for a premium plan with NordPass and LastPass:

As you can see, there’s a significant difference in costs. Plus, NordPass and LastPass only let you pay annually. You get a slightly bigger discount if you pay for two years up front with NordPass. When we were comparing NordPass to 1Password, we liked that 1Password had an option to pay monthly. You end up paying significantly more over a year, however, if you decide to stick with the product and this payment frequency.

>> Compare: LastPass vs. 1Password

Lastly, let’s take a look at the family plans.

There’s not much that separates NordPass’ and LastPass’ family plans. The price is slightly less with NordPass, and you get email masking, which is not a feature LastPass offers.

If you have a large family or a lot of friends, a plan catering to six people may not be enough. In that case, you may want to check out Dashlane. Its Friends & Family plan covers 10 people for $7.49 a month, billed annually.

>> Learn More: Dashlane Review

Ultimately, we recommend paying for a NordPass plan over LastPass. It’s not only cheaper, but we also think it offers better bang for your buck. The LastPass free plan may have a few extra features, but some of them aren’t as reliable as NordPass.

Winner: NordPass

Features

The features included with NordPass and LastPass are not significantly different. At their core, both password managers store and autofill your credentials when you log in to websites or apps. All we had to do was click the login button and we were in.

We also signed up for new accounts to see how NordPass and LastPass performed. They instantly generated a strong password to use, which saved us time racking our brains to think of something unique.

When we logged in to the password managers for the first time, we were taken to the password health screen. NordPass and LastPass reviewed the credentials we uploaded and labeled them weak or reused. We could click the link attached to the password to update it, but most of the time it was outdated. We visited the websites manually to fix the issue.

The next action NordPass and LastPass gave us was to enter an email address for dark web scanning. NordPass listed the personal information exposed in data breaches and file collections listed on the dark web. It couldn’t tell us how the details ended up on the dark web, but it showed us what data they had. One was only an old password, and another was our email address.

LastPass’ dark web monitoring didn’t return any results. When you sign up, it will check retroactively against breaches up to one year prior, but its primary purpose is to alert you about new breaches. The feature isn’t available on smartphone apps, so you’ll need to use a laptop app to run it. We don’t recommend relying on the web app, because we found it quite buggy.

Another feature worth discussing is exclusive to NordPass. A lot of websites ask for an email address when you sign up. As we learned from our dark web monitoring results, that information can be exposed along with passwords. NordPass’ email-masking tool lets you create fake addresses that divert the correspondence to your actual email.

You can create up to 200 email masks per account. When we were creating new accounts to test NordPass and LastPass, we made multiple email addresses with the tool. That way, if that company gets hacked, the criminals will get only one fake email address and password and won’t be able to log in to all our other services.

Throughout our testing, we found NordPass more reliable. LastPass’ web app didn’t always work, and we were surprised by its lack of dark web monitoring results. Plus, we think email masking adds extra protection to our passwords in case our data is hacked. We’re giving this category to NordPass.

Winner: NordPass

Ease of Use

Whether you’re downloading your first password manager or switching from another provider, signing up for NordPass and LastPass is the easiest part. Once we started using them on a daily basis, we started noticing how different they are.

Our NordPass Experience

After installing NordPass in our Chrome browser, on our MacBook Pro, and on our Android smartphone, we were prompted to upload our login credentials. Thankfully, it was easy. We downloaded a .csv file from Chrome and uploaded it to NordPass. All the instructions were in the app and helped us progress through the steps.

Using NordPass never felt invasive. The only time we noticed it was when it would autofill login information. We had to enter our master password into NordPass whenever we started a new browsing session though. When we were testing Dashlane, we liked that it let us choose to stay logged in for 14 days at a time.

We logged in to the apps to access features such as dark web monitoring and email masking. No matter which device we used, all the features were accessible. If we completed an action, it would sync across all devices. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the same experience with LastPass.

>> Read More: NordPass Review 2024

Our LastPass Experience

We installed LastPass on the same devices as NordPass to compare apples to apples. We even used the same .csv file we downloaded from Chrome. LastPass had issues reading the file when we uploaded it to the web app, though, even though it was its preferred file type. When we uploaded it to the MacOS app, there was no issue. It read the file and saved all our login information.

Thankfully, once we got past those issues, LastPass worked well. Like NordPass, we needed to enter our master password every time we started a new browsing session. We could also use biometrics to log in to the Android app, but that option wasn’t available on the browser or laptop apps.

>> Check Out: Best Password Managers for Android

Speaking of LastPass’ Android app, it doesn’t include the same features as the other apps. The Security Dashboard, which measures your online security using your password health and dark web monitoring results, is unavailable. The page refers you to the desktop app.

Instead of the Security Dashboard, the smartphone app has a Security Challenge. It analyzes the information you’ve given LastPass and ranks you against other customers. There are other useful stats featured, as well, including your average password length and how many times you’ve set up multifactor authentication. Given LastPass’ history with data breaches, though, we’re not thrilled about comparing our data with other customers’ data. We’d prefer access to the Security Dashboard to fix any password or data breach issues while we’re on the go.

Our experience with NordPass was positive from the moment we signed in. We also like that all the features are available in every app and sync instantly when you switch among them. Unfortunately, we couldn’t say the same for LastPass, which is why NordPass wins this category.

Winner: NordPass

Verdict: NordPass or LastPass

If you got this far, you’ve already seen that NordPass has swept every category. That’s not to say LastPass isn’t a good password manager. We like what’s included in its free plan, and it stores and auto-fills your login details after you get past the initial setup.

But that is our biggest issue with LastPass: It wasn’t easy to set up, and we ran into problems using the web app. We also regularly switch between our laptops and smartphones, so not having access to the same features makes it challenging to manage our digital security. Add that to the fact that LastPass has been hacked three times, and it makes us question whether we should store any login details in their vault.

Considering it’s future-proof with a faster and more secure encryption algorithm in place — and also that it worked as intended on every one of our devices — we’re more inclined to renew our NordPass premium plan.