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Credit: Proton AG
Proton Pass is one of the youngest and yet best password managers on the market, already catching up to industry veterans like 1Password and BitWarden. Now, the company is looking to make its free password manager even more useful, while also adding in some extra functionality for premium subscribers. At its most basic level, Proton Pass is completely free to all users. This gets you a genuinely competitive password manager, and now access to the new Pass Monitor and Password Health features, which will tell you if your passwords are weak or reused. The password manager will even be able to identify if your accounts do not have 2FA (two-factor authentication), which you can then activate without leaving the app or website. Proton says these checks are all done on-device, too, without sending any of your private data over the internet. This new update also brings Proton Pass even more in line with some of its biggest competitors. 1Password, another popular manager that I've used for several years, offers similar functionality, but requires a monthly subscription. Other options, like LastPass, offer a free plan, but with recent data breaches, some might not be comfortable going with that option. There's also Bitwarden, which also features a free plan and has previously earned glowing recommendations. However, security reports for Bitwarden are locked behind a premium subscription that costs $10 a year. Proton Pass, by contrast, avoids locking core functionality behind a monthly subscription. Instead, users that pick up the Pass Plus plan for $1.99 a month (or those that subscribe to Proton Unlimited) get a suite of bonus features. The newest of these is real-time Dark Web Monitoring, which was announced today and will alert you if any of your email addresses or other private information leaks onto the dark web. This new function works in conjunction with the recent release of Proton Mail's Dark Web Monitoring. Premium users also get access to Proton Sentinel, a system designed to help stop account takeovers even if someone successfully steals your Proton login details. The company says that Sentinel has stopped over 15,000 account takeovers since it launched in August of 2023. Son Nguyen, Director of Product at Proton, says "Pass Monitor allows users to evaluate the security status of their online credentials and provides immediate alerts if their data is compromised," offering a proactive way to protect your important accounts and private information.