LastPass Review - Everything You Want from a Password Manager

excellent
key review info
application features
  • Stores your credentials and synchronizes them over a large palette of devices
  • (6 more, see all...)

With banking, social media, file-sharing, and e-mail services that are inevitably a big part of our lives, there is no surprise that you might find yourself a bit overwhelmed with the sheer number of accounts and passwords you need to remember.

Because having the same password for all your accounts or manually managing your passwords are neither efficient nor safe options, it is clear that what you need is a software solution for password management.

LastPass is a comprehensive password manager designed to not only keep your passwords safe and within easy reach, but also to boost your password managing workflow by simplifying it as much as possible.

Say goodbye to remembering lots of passwords and let LastPass take care of the rest

In a nutshell, LastPass helps you store account credentials, IDs, Wi-Fi passwords, important records, create strong and unique passwords, and fill logins automatically, all while keeping all of your data encrypted locally with the help of a secure key and a 256-bit AES encryption system with salted hashing.

Basically, your life will become simpler and more comfortable because, from now on, you will have to remember only one password: LastPass’ master password.

Because LastPass comes with support for all major desktop and mobile platforms (OS X, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android, and BlackBerry), as well as for most popular browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer), chances are it will be very easy for you to keep your important data with you at all times.

LastPass’ approach to password management is quite simple: once it is installed on your Mac, either as a standalone application, as a web browser extension, or both, it will prompt you to save your credentials as you log into new websites.

Once you do this, LastPass will automatically fill the login fields when you revisit the website in question, or it can be setup to only display your credentials, so you can log in manually.

It bundles a plethora of very useful features tightly packaged within a user-friendly and intuitive interface

Getting to grips with the LastPass application shouldn’t pose any kind of problems as it features a clean and easy-to-use interface, with a top search field and five main menus, namely Sites, Secure Notes, Form Fills, Favorites, and Security Challenge.

As an added benefit, LastPass can be summoned from OS X’ status bar with a single click on its menu bar item. LastPass also enables you to perform quick searches within its Vault with the help of its “Quick Search” function that can be called upon with the “Shift + CMD + L” hotkey.

By accessing LastPass’s Vault, you can view, add, organize, move, edit, delete or share accounts and passwords. Furthermore, LastPass gives you the possibility to add useful secure notes that can be used to store information for banking accounts, credit cards, and many other similar pieces of sensitive information.

Also worth noting is the fact that LastPass allows you to create FormFill profiles which contain important data needed during online shopping sessions. This means that, when you want to complete an online payment, you just have to click a previously saved profile and the online form will be instantly filled out.

To make things even simpler, LastPass also lets you mark frequently used accounts and passwords as “Favorites.” The good news doesn’t stop here, as LastPass has another ace up its sleeve: it makes it simple for you to share account information with trusted people or friends, with or without revealing your passwords.

Ease of access, increased productivity and security focus

Because security plays a key role, you can easily view whether you have duplicate or weak passwords via LastPass’ Security Challenge menu. If it happens to be the case and you do have weak or duplicate passwords, LastPass can help you by generating strong and unique passwords to effortlessly replace the ones that weren’t up to par.

If you are a security-aware user, then you can rest assured that your data will be even safer after enabling LastPass’ multifactor authentication feature. This means that, in order to log into your LastPass account, you will have to go through a second login step: it involves receiving a one-time-use code via e-mail or SMS that needs to be typed in addition to your master password.

As far as the amount of system resources LastPass needs, on an iMac with 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 6 GB RAM, the app used little to almost no CPU power and under 70 MB of RAM, when idling. Furthermore, during our tests, the CPU rates have never risen above the 10% threshold.

As with everything, there’s still room for improvement

While LastPass is a very reliable and solid application, it is not without fault. If we are to be picky, we have found both the standalone application and its browser-based counterpart to be a bit buggy, with certain controls that sometimes worked perfectly, while, from time to time, they became usable only after an app restart.

What’s more, the sync system is not what you would call snappy because, every so often, modifications done inside the Vault, within the LastPass browser extension, would be visible in the standalone app only after a minute or more.

This being said, none of the two issues described above should be considered deal breakers, thanks to LastPass being a very well thought out piece of software, with a strong core and many features that will make you stress a whole lot less about the security of your sensitive information.


The Good

LastPass is a solid and very powerful password manager that, despite its main purpose (keeping your passwords under one secure roof), has a fair amount of potential to help you save a lot of time and be more productive, while improving your online security .

The Bad

Because nothing is perfect, LastPass is definitely no exception to the rule, with occasional delays in its synchronization process, as well as an interface that still has some “rough edges.”

The Truth

Taking all of the above into consideration, it wouldn’t be exaggerated to say that LastPass is a must-have application for any Mac user who wants to secure his passwords and keep them safe from inquisitive third parties.

If you are looking for an app that will help you securely store your accounts’ credentials, perform automatic logins, and generate strong passwords, then look no further because chances are that, once you have tried LastPass, you will never want to go back to your older password management solutions.

user interface 3
features 5
ease of use 5
pricing / value 5


final rating 5
Editor's review
excellent
 
NEXT REVIEW: Moom

LastPass (18 Images)

The LastPass application features a streamlined and user-friendly interface with a top search bar and five main menu, namely Sites, Secure Notes, Form Fills, Favorites, and Security Challenge
LastPass: You saved sites will be visible in the Sites menu, and from within the same menu you can also  generate new and strong passwordsLastPass: The Secure Notes menu enables you to add large quantities of text dataLastPass: Important information can also be saved in the Secure Notes menuLastPass: The application also enables you to create form-fill profiles that contain important data necessary when buying online.
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