Voice of IT Survey: The password managers IT pros love most
Welcome to the first installment of our relaunched Voice of IT reader survey series. For those just learning about this series, and those who need a refresher, the Voice of IT has helped IT professionals shape the future of tech since 2010. After a hiatus, we’re once again conducting a monthly survey where we gather input from our audience of dedicated IT professionals to weigh-in on the various services and equipment they use in their work every day. We then report back on the results to help everyone in IT make better technology decisions.
As you may have seen throughout the site, in the Spiceworks Community, or perhaps in our newsletter, this survey asked IT pros back in July for their thoughts on corporate password managers. We had almost 600 respondents, who rated various aspects of their password managers on a scale from 1 (worst) to 5 (best). Their feedback produces some clear winners. (Note: we required at least 25 completed responses to include a product in our scoring.)
For some context on our scoring, we determined the overall winner based on their answer to the question, ‘How satisfied are you with your password manager overall?’ Likelihood to Recommend is the next score we use for an overall winner, and in this case, of the survey respondents who have used Keeper, Bitwarden, or 1Password, they were equally likely to recommend them.
If a particular password suite has a top score in a given subcategory and a strong Overall Satisfaction or Likelihood to Recommend score, we will call that out as we’ve done here.
For Microsoft Azure AD Password Protection (recently rebranded to Entra ID), and LastPass Business, both also had enough of a response to make the overall list, but their overall satisfaction and Likelihood to Recommend scores were both below the average. Microsoft earned high marks in SSO integration and integration with existing infrastructure, but scored among the lowest in terms of cost, customer support, and ease of use. For LastPass, it had average or above average scores for MFA capabilities, and compliance and audit features, but was otherwise below average overall.
Challenges
As we’re calling out the password managers our survey respondents liked, we also asked what challenges our respondents had during implementation. Nearly four in five said they had some significant challenge with the most common one being user adoption and training. 1Password and Bitwarden had the most respondents saying they had no significant challenges.
We used a different scoring system for this set of questions, so it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison with the responses for the Top Password Managers. The goal with this section is to give you an idea about what to watch out for if you adopt any of these tools, regardless of how well our survey respondents liked them overall.
User Adoption and Training: Of all the challenges we asked our respondents to call out for us, they cited user adoption and training most frequently across all of the password suites they voted for. This is an area of improvement common to password management suites in general.
Integration with Existing Systems: Respondents were much less likely to call this category out for any of the password suites they rated.
Look closely between the percentages in this category and the scores in the Top Password Managers section, and you’ll note that even though 1Password gave relatively few people difficulty integrating with other systems, it was actually a tick below average in the Top Password Manager rating for the similar question about integration with existing IT infrastructure. The reverse was true for Keeper Business.
That’s interesting ground to probe further when we run this survey again next year.
Cost/budget Constraints: Our survey respondents didn’t find cost and budgeting challenging to the same extent as they cited difficulty with user adoption, but with the exception of 1Password, 20% of respondents on average checked this box. It perhaps argues that while most companies recognize the necessity of password management software, there’s still some sticker shock that IT managers will have to navigate with most of the options out there.
Technical Setup Complexity: Microsoft had the lion’s share of respondents calling out setup as a challenge. This is another category that merits additional context next time around.
Migration from Previous Solution: The responses citing migration issues are almost exactly inverted proportionally to the replies for setup complexity. Even if the frequency of people finding this an issue is relatively low overall (12% is the category average).
Management Buy-in: With 24% of respondents calling out Management Buy-in as a challenge across password suites, it arguably points to a base level of friction with management, similar to the cost constraints question.
You can look forward to additional insights from our survey on Corporate Password Managers in a follow-up story coming in the next few days. Also, please keep an eye out for next month’s Voice of IT survey, where we dig into wireless access points, as well as the 2026 edition of our annual State of IT Survey, which dives into all the current and emerging trends across the entire IT landscape.
