Using the same password for all websites and services will put you in a high security risk, you should always use different passwords that are hard to guess. That's why it's always recommended to have your login information safely stored and easily remembered for you by using a specialized password manager, which handles the management and generation of unique, hard-to-break passwords and stores them in an encrypted database (sometimes called a Vault). KeePass is a local offline password manager, so your data are only your own, and you have the responsibility of taking care of backing it up.
Alternatives that store your data on the cloud offering convenient data synchronization and official addons support:
•
LastPass.
•
NordPass.
(both of them have a limited free plan that forces user to use a single device type)
Some rambling thoughts:
1): I used to include
Bitwarden here, but removed it due to the lack of some major features (posted them on their forum: https://community.bitwarden.com/t/lacking-major-features-save-prompts-for-example/26695/5). In addition: within the last trial I gave it, I had a horrible experience with it, where I tried it for 6 days, and on the 7th day it 'suddenly' told me that my master password or email is wrong even though the possibility of me forgetting or mistyping the same password that I wrote at least once a day everyday is literally zero!!! Well, it was not exactly "suddenly" but it absurdly happened after changing my router's settings, and of course I tried different networks and platforms and devices, but it didn't help!! It just makes no sense. I also had copied the recovery code earlier, but turns out it's useless without activating 2FA and I didn't have it activated - therefore I was completely out of luck - and decided to forget about this software altogether and not recommend it!
2): On the lookout for a truly good FREE password manager, I literally tried every available option out there that supports browser extensions (I see it as the bare minimum requirement for a convenient password manager) but couldn't find any software that even comes close to the awesomeness of Myki !! ( it's indeed criminally underrated, maybe due to its non cloud-sync approach which could have turned some people off, but on contrary, that's the aspect I do appreciate the most! ). --- Edit: All this talk is gone to void right now, as the product has being abandoned by the developers, thus I fell back to the good old classic manager: KeePass.
Comments
This is not only a very astute assessment of the current software landscape for Windows users, but also a very cogently assembled presentation of them; you are to be highly commended for creating and maintaining it as you do. :)
That said, we wouldn't be proper nerds if we didn't have a bunch of strongly-held and nuanced opinions about our particular nerd domains, right? So for the sake of nothing more than my own peace of mind, I'm including below a few thoughts I had about various aspects as I read this. I don't expect them to have any impact other than possibly triggering your own reevaluation of available alternatives upon your next update.
The one and only recommendation in your proffer that I had a strong negative reaction to was SpeedCrunch. So much of any digital device's raw power is derived from mathematical operations that it's patently ridiculous that almost all available flavors of operating system from Windows to MacOS to UNIX-like distributions all neglect to include an application that can conveniently and intuitively serve as a drop-in replacement to a good ol' scientific calculator (I still carry a Sharp EL-W516TBSL in my attaché case wherever I go and am continually surprised at how often I pull it out).
Sadly, I don't think SpeedCrunch satisfies either the convenience or intuitiveness qualifiers of my earlier statement; the UI still requires users to find so many function nicknames by trial-and-error and the minimalist GUI keypad feels straight out of the Bronze Age and is obviously a non-priority for the developers. I'm only aware of one project in this space that has the maturity, UI and feature set that would merit recommending or using myself, and that's Qalculate!. It's certainly not perfect, I think it might even be guilty of allowing feature creep to hamper the clarity of the menus and keypad layouts, but I challenge anyone to spend thirty minutes exploring exactly what it's capable of doing, from combinatorics to matrices to periodic table data and up-to-date currency conversions, and lack a profound sense of amazement at the end.
I don't have that much experience with Myki, it seemed to hit all the right notes when I gave it a brief implementation during my last evaluation period, but neither did it demonstrate any unique advantages or novel functionalities from what I saw. It may have changed or you might just know it better, I won't take issue with its inclusion either way. What I WILL take issue with is the inclusion of LastPass in any serious review of the vast number of products in this space. They were already seriously dysfunctional as a commercial software house during the LogMeIn period, but post-Francisco/Elliott acquisition they've become nothing but hot SaaS garbage. That's of course just my opinion, though I would truly be surprised to encounter anyone with a depth of InfoSec knowledge who genuinely held an overall satisfactory opinion of their current position in this vertical. If you included them because you do indeed feel as such, I hope that you'll reply and tell me what I'm missing, I mean that.
Personally, I think Bitwarden is the only viable option at the moment for a non-power user that is yet to be convinced of the rationale for investing in a commercial password manager offering. The fact that they are simply able to keep pace with the feature sets of the plethora of for-profit competitors verges on the miraculous, let alone are able to stand out in some ways like password generation and a free, managed cloud sync option without losing focus or abandoning their no-cost tier verges on the miraculous, in my opinion. Add to that the fact that their middle-of-the-road hosted service that is essentially at or above feature parity with all the "big boys'" $30-$60/yr. plans despite only costing $10 by comparison, and I'm ready to call a TKO for the bout. We could talk about 1Password or even Dashlane as viable alternatives, but those don't suit the list's tone as well as BW.
I have some other more minor thoughts, but they'll have to wait until after I've gotten some sleep. Again, truly fantastic list, definitely the best I've read on AlternativeTo by far.
Thank you very much Mr. Peter, I'm indeed flattered by your overwhelmingly nice words! Of course, all opinions and thoughts are welcomed, and in fact encouraged, because I myself doubt some of the decisions I've made with the list sometimes, and I feel the need for other people's evaluations and advice just to make it even better and more useful.
"Calculators" was one of the surprisingly difficult tools to pick. I tried a couple of suggested alternatives on here, but most really missed something, and I don't know why I have skipped Qalculate, maybe it escaped me and went oversight. But I just took a look at Qalculate. And man, it turns out exactly what I have been looking for! So, thanks a lot for the first suggestion that made its way to the list!
"Password Managers", the section that I knew for sure would fire lots of debate and was always hesitant about it. I'm fairly new to password managers, I started using them at the same time I created this list, and I actually discovered them & learned about their importance from the community of this very website. I started off with BW.. So in my expectations, I hoped it would be as simple and efficient as my firefox's or chrome's built-in password managers, so I could save myself some time looking up tutorials and documentations, because personally I believe that a good piece of software is one that excels at approaching new users without making them feel like it's a whole new world they have to go through and discover. But that wasn't the case with BW unfortunately.
For example, when you create a new account, the browsers' built-in managers pop up asking you to save the new login; Bitwarden, however, did not.
On input forms, browsers suggest a random password to use, which is the key feature and essence of any password manager, but Bitwarden did not, because you have to do it manually. So I said to myself "Okay, no problem I will do it manually .. My security is worth it".. Now the login has been saved to my account.
Once you have a password saved for any domain, the browser's default behavior was to show a popup asking you to the fill form with one click, but Bitwarden did not, because this too was supposed to be done manually.. Here I was like "What's the point?!!". Those very basic automation features are actually what I really care about besides a convenient sync and automatic backup. Eventually I failed to see how Bitwarden could prove to be any useful. Having everything done manually was a deal-breaker. So I gave up on it and started testing the other popular alternatives out there, but I kept LastPass out of the equation due to its discouraging hacks history.. And none of the mainstream password managers really clicked with me because of the constraints they had on their free tiers, mainly the limit of 50 logins, when I have over 80 and for other various reasons such as bad form detection or broken auto-fill feature and so on.
Later I gave LastPass a try, and man, it was simply what I have always been wanting, no more no less! - Or wait - maybe there were some missing wishes actually; like being open-source, and offering more 2FA options, and the security of their unknown servers would always haunt me in the back of my head. But still, usability-wise, it was checking all the marks for me!
Fast-forwards few months later, I discovered Myki, and again, it wasn't as easy to get into as LastPass was, but definitely easier than Bitwarden, I liked it a lot, and felt safe using it when realizing that my vault is my own responsibility. Despite its different and unique setup approach from other password managers, it felt to make lots of sense to me. Thus I stuck to it.
It's getting too long now, sorry for boring you with this long poorly-written story, I will jump straight to the bottom line: I don't claim LastPass, NordPass or Myki are the absolute best, each one has its own minuses, but one thing for sure, their user-friendliness is way out of the league of Bitwarden. BW just requires too much unnecessary work to make the most out of it. Bitwarden had me some seriously creepy issues that made it impossible for me to recommend to anyone (the one I mentioned above in the list relating to changing the router's settings).
Edit: Myki is now dead. I went to the classy good old KeePass which is really awesome. While it doesn't do much, but at the few things it does, it does it right.
Thank you a lot for your lovely input again, and have a nice day/night! Looking forward for more thoughts and recommendations.
[Edited by MD98SY]
QTTabBar is something I needed for a long time, going to try it out. Thanks!
You're welcome! I'm glad to help!
Nice list ! But just as an observation : the link for the Microsoft Office student offer isn't available anymore.
Thanks mate! I will update the link right away, I'm so grateful for pointing that out! Have a nice one.
This is the most useful list I've seen here. I use Joplin as a secure note taking app. It has a portable version and can sync in the cloud (example: Nextcloud). It also has a Web Clipper for Firefox and Chrome, which is really useful.
Thank you Joao, I was actually planning on updating the list and add more productivity apps, so after searching and testing several options, your suggestion helped me decide what note-taking app to choose, so thanks a lot! I've just finished updating the list. Please let me know what do you think and if you have any more suggestions, I will definitely take them into consideration.
Cool list! I think you should consider mentioning Foxit Reader as well since it has all of Gaaiho Reader's features plus has epub support.
Thank you, I'm glad you liked the list. Foxit Reader is indeed popular and pretty practical, but the thing that prevents me from recommending it to people is the fact that it has some seriously annoying banners inside the app promoting their other products, moreover, the installer has many bundled bloatware (can be opted out, but inexperienced users usually just click 'next' in every installation process). Anyway, I will be soon updating the list, I'm going to edit the PDF software, if I find anything really better than Sumatra and Gaaiho. Thank you again for liking the list.
You can easily disable the banner and ads by going in the settings. It has 2 optional installation one for avast and the other for a VPN you can opt out very easily by clicking the big Decline button. I think even inexperienced users are smart enough to decline it.
Well I didn't actually know about that, I will give it a new try and see how it works out for me. But generally speaking, an app that has optional "bloat-ware", in-app ads banners, and collecting data to improve user experience option enabled by default, is not a trustworthy app for me. I know, you might say that all these things could be solved easily. An app with everything set up and ready to use in a safe and convenient manner out of the box is definitely a better option than an app you'll to go through a bit of hassle to suite the users needs. If I don't find such an option, I will add Foxit to the list with a warning of those cons mentioned. Finally, I appreciate the time you spent for giving your opinion and suggestion.
So for you you'd rather have more privacy in an app. I use foxit for it's functionality that's it. I personally don't mind if an app has telemetry especially since everything has it from Maps to the browser. And majority of apps of course will have them enabled as it goes to improving the app itself. There are a few good apps out there that unfortunately do have optional bloat as well but it's usually easy to click. Now I'm with you when it has to do with apps that install bloat without user consent or knowledge or actively logs user data without proper encryption or sends said data to obscure places like what UC browser was doing. To disable the ads/banner you go into the settings general, scroll down and you'll see the option to disable them.