Most families do not buy a password manager because they were hacked. They buy one because the same eight passwords are spread across four people, two tablets, a smart TV and a router admin page nobody has opened since 2019. Fixing that takes an afternoon, but only if you build the vault in the right order — get the order wrong and you spend the next month locked out.
Choose by headcount, not by feature list
Count the people who will genuinely use it, including the teenager who says they will and then does not, and check the family tier covers that number.
- Bitwarden Families: about $40 a year, six users, unlimited shared collections, self-hosting optional. The free plan shares between two people only.
- 1Password Families: roughly $5 a month for five people, a dollar more per extra seat, with 1 GB of document storage and a travel mode that hides vaults at borders.
- Dashlane Friends & Family: ten accounts and a bundled VPN, at a higher annual price.
- Proton Pass Family: six users, plus email aliases for shops that insist on an address.
Confirm the figure before paying for a year; these move. Four capabilities decide whether a family plan survives real life: separate shared vaults, an emergency-access path for a trusted contact, an admin console you can use to cut off a lost phone, and a plain export. That last one is not paranoia — if the service raises prices or closes, an export is the only thing that gets 300 logins out.
Lay out the vaults before you invite anybody
Decide the structure first; moving 200 items afterwards is miserable. Three tiers cover almost every household: a Household vault for things everyone needs (Wi-Fi password, electricity account, Netflix, boiler insurance, school portal), a Money vault for the two adults, and a Private vault per person that nobody else can open.
In 1Password you create the shared vault from the admin console — Vaults → New Vault — then grant each member an access level. In Bitwarden it is Organization → Collections → New Collection, and you add members to a collection rather than to the whole organization. Leave teenagers on read-only by default and add edit rights only for the accounts they actually maintain.
The rule that prevents most household friction: never drag a personal login into a shared vault because two people happen to use the site. The streaming subscription belongs in Household; somebody’s email does not, however often the other person needs to read it.
The master password, and the piece of paper
Every family manager encrypts locally, so the vendor cannot reset your master password. Forget it and the vault is a random blob — that is the security model working as designed, and it is also the most common way a family loses its data.
Make the password memorable rather than clever. Four to six unrelated words — harbor-tin-opera-lantern-42 — gives well over 20 characters and survives being typed on a television remote. Substitution tricks like P@ssw0rd add almost nothing and guarantee you forget which letter you mangled.
Write it on paper. Two copies, two locations: a household file and a relative’s house or a safe. Not a note on the phone, not a draft email, not a photo in the camera roll. Keep the 2FA recovery codes somewhere separate, so one break-in does not hand over both halves.
Then secure the account itself with an authenticator app rather than SMS, since SIM-swap fraud defeats text codes — Aegis or Raivo on Android, 1Password’s built-in TOTP on iPhone. Print the recovery codes when they appear, because they are shown once.
Import what you already have, then shred the CSV
Chrome keeps saved logins at chrome://password-manager/settings, where Export passwords produces a plain-text CSV after a device-password prompt. Firefox uses about:logins → menu → Export logins; Safari exports from macOS Settings → Passwords.
Import that file into the manager, check the duplicate count, and merge by hand where the tool guessed wrong. Then delete the CSV and empty the trash — an unencrypted file in Downloads is the biggest hole in this whole process, and it is the step people skip. Finally switch off the browser’s own password saving (chrome://settings/autofill), or two autofill engines will fight over the same field and you will blame the manager.
House rules that stop the usual failures
Appoint one organizer for billing and one backup with recovery rights — Bitwarden’s Emergency Access lets a trusted contact request the vault after a waiting period you choose, and 1Password allows a second family organizer. If one person holds all the admin rights and ends up in hospital, the household is stuck.
Ban passwords over chat. A WhatsApp screenshot is how credentials end up in a group of thirty. Both services offer a proper alternative: Bitwarden Send with an expiry and a maximum access count, or a 1Password item link that dies after an hour.
Store passkeys in the manager rather than only on the phone, so losing a handset is an inconvenience instead of a lockout; the passkey walkthrough sets out which accounts to migrate first.
Run a fifteen-minute review every three months: open the weak and reused password report, clear the breach alerts, confirm both paper copies still exist, and check nobody has quietly gone back to saving passwords in Chrome. The day-to-day vault habits matter more than the initial setup, and a breach check gives you a realistic list of what to change first.
For the vendor’s own instructions rather than a summary, Bitwarden’s help center and 1Password’s support library document family setup, emergency access and export step by step.