You know how this works, right? You get login credentials and an email account from your iSP. There’s one from work. There’s one from Yahoo! or Gmail, too. Then there are the online stores you signup to use.
Amazon, Walmart, et al. Oh, don’t forget all the banks, insurance companies, and another dozen websites, all of which require a unique username or ID and… insert drum roll here… another password. Is it any wonder we hate passwords. What we need is a way to manage them all. Here’s another one that starts out free.
Goodbye, Subscriptions
Back in the day such must have utilities were free for internet users. Then shareware came along. Pay if you like it. That became donationware and everything else is commercial. Pay, then pay again for an upgrade. Now, it’s pay all the time with a subscription. Here’s a password manager utility that’s free. Unless you use it too much.
It’s called Secrets and while it’s similar to other Mac and iPhone password manager apps– familiar setup, accounts, and usage, there are some differences. See?
What you get is the familiar list of logins in the left sidebar. Click on one and you’ll see all the details from username to password, notes, history, services, and more. On the surface, nothing special.
Where Secrets shines is in a few useful areas not always available in more expensive password managers. First, sync between Macs, iPhone, and iPad via iCloud. Auto fill and a cool password generator are built in. You can easily import or transfer password details from 1Password and LastPass– both of which have adopted a pay forever subscription model.
As you would expect, Secrets can store more than just usernames and passwords. There are fields for notes, credit card numbers, banking information, and just about anything you want kept confidential.
Secrets also comes with an option to generate one-time passwords for services that support two-factor authentication. That’s remarkably handy. Security is an odd mixture of OpenPGP (yeah, it’s still around) and standard AES 128-bit encryption using SHA-256 as the hashing algorithm. That’s geek speak for very secure.
Another secret for Secret is the price tag. It’s free to use for up to 10 username and login combos. After that, the Mac version has a price tag less than many popular Mac password managers, and the iPhone and iPad version is half the Mac’s price.
