Pros & Cons

• 
  
  
  Affordable and feature-rich business plans
• 
  
  
  Attractive interface on desktop and mobile
• 
  
  
  Excellent security standards
• 
  
  
  Zero-knowledge encryption
• 
  
  
  Heavily discounted plans for students, military and medical professionals

• 
  
  
  Plans for individuals and families are expensive
• 
  
  
  Dark web monitoring costs extra
• 
  
  
  Missing features like email masking

With a head-spinning collection of integrations and administrative controls, Keeper feels designed with businesses in mind. It offered the most customization options of any password manager for businesses that I tested, and it’s also the most affordable, with plans starting at just $2 a user each month. Keeper’s business plans for companies with more than 10 users also come with an unrivaled perk: a free Keeper Family plan for every user in the company. 

But that considerable functionality for businesses seems to come at the cost of Keeper’s plans for individuals, which I found lacking overall. Despite being one of the most expensive password managers I tested, its Premium plan doesn’t include features such as dark web monitoring or email masking that came standard with other paid password managers. For personal plans, NordPass offers a far better value.

How much does Keeper cost? 

Keeper’s value varies dramatically depending on what type of plan you get. Its plans for individuals and families were some of the most expensive I saw, while its plans for businesses were the most affordable. Keeper does offer a completely free plan, but it’s relatively limited compared to other free password managers. 

Business plans

Keeper offers some of the most advanced and customizable password management options for businesses that I saw, and it does it at some of the lowest price points for each business size.

For small businesses with five to 10 users, Keeper charges $2 a user each month, which was as low as any other password manager I saw. This comes with essentials like unlimited credentials across unlimited devices and basic multi-factor authentication, but security permissions will essentially be the same for all team members. For more advanced controls, you’ll need to upgrade to the Business or Enterprise plans, which both require a minimum of 10 users.

The Business plan gives security administrators the ability to delegate management permissions to team members, transfer an employees’ password vault when they leave the organization and integrate Keeper with your business’s existing technology.  

If your business is already using an authentication platform like Entra ID, Okta or Ping, however, you’ll have to upgrade to the Enterprise plan to use it with Keeper. This tier also includes deeper administrator functions like SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management), Single Sign-On (SAML 2.0) authentication and the option to customize functions using a command line or text user interface. 

On both the Business and Enterprise plans, Keeper includes a free Family plan for all of its users, a $92 per year value on its own that allows up to five users per account. 

Personal plans

Like many password managers, Keeper offers you a lower price if you’re willing to commit to a longer period upfront. You’ll save roughly $39 over three years on the Unlimited plan when you pay for it all upfront, or $83 on the Family plan. But even with those savings factored in, Keeper’s personal plans are still on the expensive side. 

A year of Keeper’s Unlimited plan will cost you $43. Most password managers hovered around $30 a year, and our favorite overall, NordPass, charges just $35.76 for two years on its Premium plan.

You’d expect one of the most expensive password managers for personal use to come loaded with security features, but Keeper’s Unlimited plan was fairly run-of-the-mill. It gives you access to a Security Audit that shows you which of your passwords are weak or reused, but that’s about where it ends. 

Other password managers like NordPass and 1Password include scans for passwords exposed in data breaches as a part of their paid plans. Keeper, on the other hand, upsells you on services like these. It will show you that an alarmingly high number of your records have turned up in data breaches, but you’ll need to shell out an extra $27 a year to find out which ones.

That’s not to say you don’t get any kind of security auditing with Keeper Unlimited. It still includes an analysis of all your saved passwords to determine which ones are weak or reused. But Keeper is already one of the most expensive password managers around, and holding your compromised credentials hostage for a couple extra bucks a month feels like a bridge too far — especially when the feature comes standard with so many other password managers. 

Free plan

It’s hard to quibble too much with a service that doesn’t cost anything, but Keeper’s free password management plan is one of the most limited I’ve seen. It maxes out at 10 saved passwords, you can only use it on one device and you don’t have the option to contact Keeper’s customer support. If you don’t want to pay for password management, there are much better options than Keeper. Our favorite free password manager, Bitwarden, allows you to save unlimited passwords on as many devices as you need.

Setup and user experience

Overall, Keeper was fairly simple to get set up, with a little more hand-holding than other password managers I tested. As soon as you create your account, a pop-up window appears with everything you need to get started. That doesn’t seem like a huge deal, but I was surprised by how many password managers leave you on your own to start. 

Within a few minutes of creating my Keeper account, I had already imported all my passwords from both my computer and phone, turned on biometric authentication and stored my account recovery phrase in a safe place. This was an added layer of security that was rare among the password managers I tested. In the event you forget your master password, you’re able to access your Keeper account using a long string of random words. 

This might feel like overkill for some users who might prefer to simply reset their password with an email, but I appreciated Keeper’s dedication to sealing up the most common points of attack for malicious actors. That theme showed up in small ways as I tested Keeper over several weeks. When I entered the wrong master password on the mobile app, for instance, Keeper notified me that I had four more tries before all the locally stored data was erased from my phone.

With most services, I would probably be irked by this Mission Impossible-style self-destruction, but it felt like the appropriate level of protection for a login that has access to every other login I’ve ever used. 

Using saved and new passwords

Once I’d gone through Keeper’s onboarding checklist, I set about using it in my daily life. The vast majority of your time with any password manager will be spent either accessing saved passwords or creating new ones. On both fronts, Keeper worked flawlessly.

When I tried to log into an account on my phone and computer, Keeper pulled up a list of all my saved accounts instantly and input my credentials with one click. If I wanted to do an on-the-spot audit of my password health for a specific login, I could click a “Show More” button that showed me a health bar for the password with a link to autogenerate a new one. 

This was a nice touch that encouraged me to change weak passwords as I used them, and I found myself updating old logins consistently as I tested Keeper. Password generation is a core function of any password manager, but Keeper made the feature more available than other services I tested, which often required you to detour to the mobile app and copy and paste in a new password. 

That went for creating new passwords, too. Rather than leave the password field blank initially, Keeper automatically generated a unique password every time. If you want each of your passwords to be unique and random, Keeper removes a lot of the friction that might lead you to falling back on old favorites during the account setup process.

Privacy and security

Like many of the top password managers, Keeper uses zero-knowledge encryption, which means your master password is encrypted on your local device before it ever reaches a server. This means an attack on Keeper won’t actually put your data at risk, since everything it has access to is encrypted. 

Keeper also checked all the compliance boxes we looked for, including regular audits from third-party researchers and industry certifications like SOC 2 and the latest ISO standards. The company keeps one of the most comprehensive security databases I saw, with detailed information on vulnerabilities it has identified and the actions it has taken to address them.

Dark web monitoring costs extra

Keeper does a lot to encourage good password hygiene, but you might have to pay more to get the full suite of security tools. Keeper’s dark web scanner, called BreachWatch, requires an add-on purchase of $27 a year. Dark web monitoring is included with most of the paid password managers I tested, so this was pretty frustrating — especially since Keeper showed me that I had 446 “records at risk,” but I couldn’t see them unless I ponied up.

This was in line with Keeper’s product in general, which felt designed more for businesses than individuals. If you want to add BreachWatch to your business’s plan, it’ll cost you an extra $24 a year for each user. 

Password health

Keeper’s password health audit lives under a section called Security Audit. It was comparable to most other password managers I tested, marking each of your passwords as Weak, Fair, Medium or Strong.

Unlike paid plans from other password managers, though, these designations are based entirely on the password itself — not its appearance in any data breaches. That limited the usefulness of the feature quite a bit, but on its own, Keeper’s Security Audit made it pretty easy to click over to the account site to update credentials with a stronger password. 

Multi-factor authentication

Keeper gives you a number of options for multi-factor authentication, including text messages, 

Time-based One-Time Password, or TOTP, generator apps like Google and Microsoft Authenticator, RSA SecureID, Duo Security or Keeper DNA, which lets you use a biometric authenticator with smartwatches. For the more hardcore security-conscious web surfer, Keeper also employs FIDO2 authentication with physical security keys such as YubiKey.

Customer support

Hopefully you won’t be spending too much time chatting with your password manager’s customer support, but as the holder of all your most sensitive information, it’s important that you’re able to reach someone if an issue does come up. 

When I opened Keeper’s live chat feature, I was connected with a real person within a minute. I threw several detailed questions at the representative, and they answered each one patiently and with a minimum of canned answers. Some of the live chat features on other password managers were quick to pass me off to help center articles and call it a day, but Keeper’s support team actually addressed each of my issues. 

That experience gives me some peace of mind recommending Keeper for businesses specifically. If you’re struggling to implement one of the many available integrations or administrator controls for your company, there will be an actual human on the other end of the chat that can help walk you through the process.

The bottom line

Keeper isn’t the first password manager I’d recommend for individual users. It was a breeze to use on both desktop and mobile, but at $43 for one year, it’s one of the pricier services I tested, and it still doesn’t come with standard features like dark web monitoring included. 

But it’s a different story for companies looking to introduce password management to their organization. No other password manager earned a higher value score for businesses, and Keeper comes with an extensive list of integrations and features that work with your existing security processes. On its business plans for 10 users or more, every employee also gets a free subscription to Keeper’s Family plan — one of the most enticing perks I saw from any password manager. 

Joe Supan is a senior writer for CNET covering home technology, broadband, and moving. Prior to joining CNET, Joe led MyMove’s moving coverage and reported on broadband policy, the digital divide, and privacy issues for the broadband marketplace Allconnect. He has been featured as a guest columnist on Broadband Breakfast, and his work has been referenced by the Los Angeles Times, Forbes, National Geographic, Yahoo! Finance and more.

See full bio