Password managers for small teams — what actually matters

Password managers for individuals are basically a solved problem. Picking one for a small team is harder, because you are buying access controls and recovery paths, not just an autofill engine.

What actually matters

1. Shared vaults with role-based access. Not “we all share the master password” — proper per-vault permissions.
2. Provisioning. Adding and removing teammates without copying secrets by hand. SCIM is nice; CSV import is the bare minimum.
3. Audit log. Who accessed which secret, when. Required for any post-incident review.
4. Recovery. What happens when an employee is hit by a bus or fired in anger.
5. End-to-end encryption. The vendor should not be able to read your secrets.

What does not matter much

• Number of password fields. All modern managers have plenty.
• Browser theme support. Cute but irrelevant.
• AI features. Phishing detection helps, but most “AI” branding is marketing.

How most teams get it wrong

• They pick a tool, then never enforce it. Half the team still uses the browser’s built-in autofill.
• They share one personal vault between five people, which makes onboarding and offboarding painful.
• They never set up SSO or 2FA on the manager itself.

A simple selection process

1. Make a short list of three managers that explicitly support team plans.
2. Run a two-week trial with one engineer, one non-technical teammate and the founder.
3. Decide based on offboarding flow and shared vault clarity, not feature count.

If you only remember one thing: the value of a password manager comes from everyone in the team using it for everything. A “good enough” tool that the whole team adopts beats a perfect tool that half the team ignores.