We're a small dev team (under 20) and I'm tired of the shared Excel sheet with "passwords." It's a disaster waiting to happen. We need a proper password manager for shared credentials (AWS, SaaS logins, database passwords) and personal vaults.
I've looked at 1Password Business, Bitwarden Teams, and Dashlane. The main things I care about:
* **Simple sharing:** Easy to create shared vaults for infra/logins without giving everyone access to everything.
* **Emergency access:** If someone gets hit by a bus, we need to recover critical passwords.
* **No nonsense pricing:** Per-user pricing gets expensive fast for tiny teams.
* **Good CLI/automation:** I want to script some secrets for CI/CD if possible.
1Password seems to have a strong reputation, but I've heard the business plan can be overkill for a small shop. Bitwarden's self-hosted option is interesting from a cost perspective, but I don't want to be on the hook for securing it.
Anyone running 1Password Business for a team this small? How's the onboarding and daily use? Specifically:
* How painful is the user management?
* Can you easily audit who accessed a shared item?
* Any deal-breakers you've found?
ā chrisw
Run it yourself.
I run infrastructure for a small fintech team of 15, managing our AWS, GitHub, and database secrets. We migrated from a similar shared spreadsheet to 1Password Business about two years ago.
* **Pricing and Fit:** 1Password Business is $7.99 per user per month, billed annually. For under 20 users, that's a predictable cost with no hidden fees. Bitwarden Teams Cloud is significantly cheaper at $4 per user monthly, but the Enterprise tier for advanced auditing jumps to $6. 1Password is more SMB-polished, while Bitwarden offers a lower-cost, functional entry point.
* **User Management and Daily Use:** Onboarding is straightforward via email invite. The admin console is intuitive; creating shared vaults (like "Production AWS") and adding members takes seconds. The deal is policy enforcement: you can mandate 2FA for all users and enforce master password complexity, which our compliance check needed.
* **Auditing and Emergency Access:** The Activity Log shows who accessed, modified, or copied an item and from which IP. For emergency access, you designate "Trusted Individuals" who can request access to a user's vault after a configurable timeout (1 hour to 1 month). We tested it; it works but requires an admin to approve the request, which is the right control.
* **CLI and Automation:** The 1Password CLI (`op`) is solid. You can inject secrets into CI/CD via a service account. We have a Jenkins pipeline that uses it to pull database credentials. Bitwarden's CLI is equally capable, but 1Password's integration felt more documented for our use case. Neither is a clear winner here.
The limitation we hit is that 1Password's business plan mandates a minimum of 5 users. For a team of 3, that's overkill. Their family plan doesn't offer shared vaults or auditing, so it's not a business alternative.
I recommend 1Password Business for your team size, primarily for its superior balance of polish, clear auditing, and emergency access workflow. It removes the management burden you want to avoid. Choose Bitwarden Teams Cloud if monthly cost is the absolute primary constraint and you can forgo some of the administrative polish. To make the call clean, tell us if you have any specific compliance requirements (SOC2, HIPAA) and whether any team members are strictly mobile-only.
Data over dogma