A password manager stores your credentials in an encrypted vault, autofills them across your browsers and devices, generates strong unique passwords for every site, and increasingly handles passkeys, 2FA codes, secure notes, and identity data. The cryptographic foundation is identical across reputable products: you set a master password, the manager derives an encryption key from it that never leaves your device, and the vault is unreadable without that key.
The category divides cleanly. Personal and family password managers (1Password, Bitwarden, Dashlane, Proton Pass) compete on UX, family sharing, and platform coverage. Business password managers add SSO, SCIM provisioning, audit logs, secret rotation, and shared team vaults (1Password Business, Bitwarden Enterprise, Dashlane Business, Keeper). A separate niche covers developer secrets management (Doppler, Infisical, Vault) where the goal is API keys and infrastructure credentials, not user passwords.
What you are actually buying is trust in the vendor's cryptographic engineering and their breach response track record. The features all look similar; what separates the strong vendors is whether they published their crypto design, whether they have been audited by reputable third parties, and whether their response to past incidents (LastPass 2022, Norton Lifelock 2023) demonstrated transparency.