Proton Pass: A Very Brief Review

General
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I’ve finally broken down, started following my own advice, and switched to a “cloud” based password manager. I selected Proton Pass, in part because it comes bundled with my existing Proton Mail service.

Proton Pass is fast, smooth, and easy to use. If you like the Proton style of GUI you’ll enjoy this. It integrates well with my browsers of choice (LibreWolf and Zen), and thus far it’s been a pleasure to use. It has a number of features I’m still exploring–the Vaults function for instance–but as of now I’m happy with it.

I’m running KeePassXC as a locally hosted backup, so keeping the two coordinated is going to be interesting.

Thanks for reading, I hope this is useful to someone. I’d love to hear what you think as well.

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Welcome to the forum btw :wink:

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Interesting review, how are the mobile apps? I had pretty poor experiences with BitWarden on iOS - it used to be terribly sluggish which was fixed by a rewrite, so instead nowadays it forgets about biometric auth being set up.

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Thank you! I’m glad to be here.

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On Android, I’ve had great success with all Proton apps including this one. It’s easy to integrate with either Android’s autofill or your browser of choice. YMMV of course; I’ve never been an iOS user.

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I wonder if you or others have run into this but, my only ongoing complaint is that the function to copy a field to your clipboard, on the desktop app, does not always work. Sometimes I have to switch between vaults and then go back to whatever I wanted to copy for it to work.

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I will try that a few times today and see if I have that issue. I hadn’t noticed it thus far.

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I haven’t noticed this on my end too. What browser are you using?

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I use firefox, mullvad, and Tor depending on what I am doing.

I am not sure the browsers are the issue. It seems like it has something to do with the Windows 11 desktop application, where sometimes I click to copy a field and it just will not copy.

Not really sure its OS dependent but I don’t have this issue when using it on Android. I am relatively new to Linux but haven’t experienced it with Ubuntu either.

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Windows 11 here, Mullvad, Brave & Firefox browsers, IOS all using ProtonPass.
I haven’t experienced the issue you identified.

I’ll be interested to hear if you identify the culprit.

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Tried that on Linux Mint/Zen Browser and then on Android without issue. I’m not sure what’s going on but I’ll let you know if it ever comes up for me.

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How you sync them? Please details.

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Do you need a local backup? Why not download an encrypted backup every other week?

Keepass should be separate and for stuff you’ll only use in your secure environment.

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Does that mean you’re on Proton Unlimited?

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I’ve always used KeePass, but for phones with multiple profiles, I’ve started using Proton Pass more recently.

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The only thing I miss are native standalone apps for macOS, etc.

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Agreed. If Proton Pass had a native macOS app I would switch instantly.

Now that Strongbox has been acquired, and is no longer open source or independent.

The only native choice left is Apple Passwords and kind of KeePassium.

Unfortunately, KeePassium is a Catalyst app - basically the iPad app with minor tweaks.

I’m hopeful that the developer will someday rewrite to be a AppKit or SwiftUI application.

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It’s the low-tech solution: download a backup from Proton every week and store it in KeePassXC, with a backup on an encrypted drive elsewhere.

I hope that answers @KathyM 's question as well.

It’s not an especially techie solution but it works for me thus far.

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I agree with this. For some reason, Bitwarden works so much better for me. Both on iOS and Android.

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How is it’s linux integration? Can it autofill fields in random linux apps fine or do autotype like keepassxc? Personally I’ve found keepassxc seems to have the best linux integration, I keep it synced with syncthing and proton drive by having both point to the same folder so I have like a dozen device backups of my passwords and also an offsite backup to proton.