heylogin vs 1Password vs Bitwarden: choosing a team password manager

Most teams do not choose a password manager. They end up with one, usually after somebody pastes a login into a group chat and somebody else notices.

By then the questions are practical. What does it cost per person. What happens when the person who set it up leaves. Whether anyone will actually use it, because a password manager nobody opens is worse than a spreadsheet, since at least the spreadsheet was honest about what it was.

Disclosure, before the comparison

WPfoss is the official heylogin partner for Africa. We sell heylogin licences and we deploy them, so we are not a neutral party here.

What that means in practice: every price and mechanism below is quoted from the vendor’s own page and linked, so you can check any of it. Where 1Password or Bitwarden is the better fit, this post says so, because you will find out anyway and it is cheaper for both of us if you find out now.

What the three cost

All figures are taken from each vendor’s own pricing page and were checked on 02/09/2026. Prices change. Follow the links before you budget.

heylogin through WPfoss is USD 79 per user per year, about USD 6.58 per user per month. That is the price whether you are five people or five hundred. There is no tier to pick, no seat threshold that changes the number, and nothing to negotiate. Add somebody mid-year and it is prorated for the rest of the year. See our pricing page for what it includes.

The other two price by tier, so the number you actually pay depends on which one you land in and how many seats you commit to.

On raw licence cost at the larger tiers, Bitwarden is the cheapest of the three and 1Password Business is the most expensive. If licence price is the only thing you are optimising for, that sentence is your answer and you can stop reading.

The actual difference is how you sign in

Price is the easy comparison and usually the wrong one. The thing that decides whether a rollout succeeds is what a person has to do twenty times a day.

1Password and Bitwarden are both built around a master password. You memorise one strong secret, and everything else sits behind it. 1Password adds a Secret Key to that, so an attacker needs both.

heylogin removes the master password. You approve a login by confirming it on your phone, or with a FIDO2 security key, Touch ID or Windows Hello. There is no memorised secret typed into a browser extension, because there is no memorised secret. We deploy this for teams, so that description is from running it rather than from reading about it.

That difference cuts both ways, and you should hear both halves.

It removes the failure mode that breaks most rollouts. There is no master password to forget, to reuse somewhere else, to write on a sticky note, or to be phished. On a team where the shared spreadsheet exists precisely because people could not cope with the last tool, that matters more than a dollar or two a seat.

It also makes the phone load-bearing. A dead battery, a lost handset or a phone left at home is now a login problem. Every one of those has an answer, and the answers are part of the deployment work rather than something you discover on a Monday morning.

Which one actually suits you

Pick Bitwarden if you have in-house technical people, you want the lowest licence cost, and nobody needs hand-holding. It is open source, it self-hosts, and at USD 6 per user per month for Enterprise it is hard to beat on price. If your team can run it themselves, run it yourselves.

Pick 1Password if you are already deep in its ecosystem, or you need the specific integrations and admin tooling its Business tier carries. You will pay USD 8.99 per user per month for that, which is the most of the three, and for some teams it is worth it.

Pick heylogin if the real problem is adoption rather than price. If credentials are living in WhatsApp threads because the last password manager was abandoned, removing the master password removes the reason it was abandoned. This is the case we see most often, and it is why we partnered with them rather than the other way round.

What the licence does not cover

Whichever you choose, the licence is the cheap part. Nobody bills you for the work that actually decides whether it holds:

• Getting credentials out of spreadsheets, chat threads and browser password stores
• Rotating anything that leaked on the way, because a migrated password that was already exposed is still exposed
• Designing who can see what, before 200 logins land in one shared vault
• Deciding what happens when somebody leaves, and testing it once rather than discovering it
• Training, so the thing is used rather than installed

A tool that is deployed badly is not more secure than the spreadsheet. It is a spreadsheet with a subscription.

Sources and further reading

The 1Password and Bitwarden figures come from their own pricing pages, checked 02/09/2026. The heylogin price is ours, and is on our pricing page.

• 1Password business pricing
• Bitwarden business pricing
• NIST SP 800-63B, Digital Identity Guidelines, the authentication guidance behind the move away from memorised secrets and forced rotation.

Where to go from here

If you already know which tool you want and just need it deployed properly, that is our heylogin password management engagement: rollout, migration, rotation, sharing structure and training, at a fixed fee quoted after a review.

If you are not sure yet, start with the part that is free. The domain security checker grades your domain on DMARC, SPF, DKIM, DNSSEC and CAA in about twenty seconds, in your browser, with no signup. Password sprawl and an unprotected domain usually turn up in the same companies, and the second one is quicker to fix.

Or talk to us: book a security review, email hello@wpfoss.com, call +254 709 384 200, or WhatsApp +254 118 271 160.