Current thinking about 1Password 7 vs 1Password 8

Not for me.

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So for anybody who cares and/or may find it useful, I did eventually transition to Strongbox, following their recent addition of Passkeys support (honourable mentions go to BitWarden/VaultWarden and Minimalist). In the end, there’s always a cost to transition and learning the new thing, and what I most cared about was having my data in a portable (and easily backed up!) format. Also, Strongbox didn’t give me any trouble importing from 1Password v8’s “1PUX” format; if you got trouble with your import, I suggest using 1Password to produce this format. Only passkeys won’t transition, but fortunately, I only had one of those in 1Password; the others were in my iCloud Keychain. (Unfortunately, despite the search capability in 1Pv8, there’s no easy way to find login items with passkeys in them. Convenient, that.)

Strongbox isn’t 1Password, of course. Obviously. You lose autofill for credit cards, but iCloud can sync those. You don’t get section labels, but change your field labels so they aren’t ambiguous. There’s no special treatment of different field types, which only ever presented a roadblock and not a showstopper: you have a clipboard there, and it works very effectively when you use keyboard shortcuts in Strongbox for copying particular commonly-used fields.

Strongbox uses the KeePass format, which can be read by other apps, so it’s cross-platform, even though the iOS and Mac apps are superbly “Appley”; if you buy the iOS app, you have a universal purchase that works on the Mac, and you can choose to buy subscription or lifetime. Both use the Safari autofill mechanism. On macOS, you have the Chrome and Firefox extensions, which I can confirm do work. The experience is surprisingly (and joyfully!) luscious. If there’s a downside in the workflow, it’s entry creation: unlike Keychain, it’s not inline, but because you can specify default values for new entries, it’s actually not hard to do this in the Strongbox UI itself before first use at account creation time. You get used to it, honestly.

The closure of my 1Password account provided me an opportunity to see what disaster recovery might look like in the event of sabotage at AgileBits. I’m not impressed. First, if the account is closed (itself a painfully easy thing to do, with no grace recovery period), then the moment you go online, the 1Password cache will auto-destruct when the client notices that the account is gone. Then the cache itself, a sqlite database, is clearly an encrypted (good) internal representation of the client’s state. In order to recover your data, you’d be reliant on not going online and copying that data in place, and hoping that the data structures are compatible with whatever version of the app you have. I think that’s an incredibly dicy thing to do, frankly, and I’ll not endorse it. If Strongbox becomes unavailable, a KeePass database can always be read by other tools, most (all?) of which are Open Source. In fact, my biggest fear is actually that something might happen to the Strongbox developer’s, or to my own, Apple account, since you’d need those to be active in order to have access to a working and licensed app, because otherwise you’d have to build it from source code. Clearly, it’s the database file that’s important, not the app. And yes, it really will sync through iCloud, Dropbox, from and to a NAS using sftp, etc. with your password providing all the security, so no funny business with maintaining difficult-to-remember pieces of information that you print on paper, as long as you have a current copy of your database file somewhere. iCloud documents are backed up by Time Machine, and Strongbox performs local backups of its own, so there’s basically no risk even to using iCloud Drive if you store that data locally.

Anyway, I hope it helps you. I’m pretty pleased, for what it’s worth.

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I’m still using 1Password 6 stand-alone and it seems to do what I need. At least I haven’t had any thoughts of “if only it could do ‘x’”.

Any good reasons I should consider updating?

Passkeys? SSH agent? Modern browser support? It’s up to you, really, but I’d think about at least converting that database into a usable format.