Password Managers for a Two-Person Shop: What We Picked and

Two people, one shared bank account, and about forty logins that both of us need to touch: the business banking portal, the accountant’s file-sharing link, the domain registrar, the SaaS thing we pay for annually and forget, the electric company. For years that lived in a spreadsheet called passwords.xlsx on a shared drive. I’m not proud of it.

We finally moved to a password manager this year. Here’s what we actually chose, what we tried first, and the parts that still annoy me.

Why the spreadsheet had to go

The spreadsheet worked fine right up until it didn’t. Two people editing the same file, one of us changing the bank password and forgetting to tell the other, the file sitting in cloud storage with a name that screams “steal me.” No audit trail. No way to know who had the old version.

A shared vault fixes the coordination problem. One entry, two people with access, one place to update it. When our bookkeeper needed the accounting portal login, we didn’t text a password. That alone was worth the switch.

What we tried first: the free one baked into antivirus

We already run Avast One Free, and it ships with a password manager. On paper that’s convenient: one less subscription, one less thing to install.

I wanted to like it. I didn’t. PCMag’s review of Avast One Free notes that its password manager “lacks advanced features,” and that matches what we hit. Sharing a credential cleanly between two people is the entire reason we’re here, and a stripped-down manager makes that clumsy. The antivirus itself is genuinely good (perfect lab scores, strong phishing blocking, all free), but the bundled vault feels like a checkbox feature rather than the point.

Avira Free Security also throws in a password manager, alongside real-time protection and a software updater. Same story. Fine as a bonus. Not what I’d build a two-person workflow on.

If you only need a vault for yourself, the free built-in option is honestly enough. For a shop with two sets of hands, it isn’t.

What we picked: a dedicated shared vault

We went with a proper password manager built around sharing from the start, not sharing bolted on afterward. The deciding factors, in order:

Real shared folders. Not “send this one password.” A folder the accountant can see, a folder only the two of us see, and moving an entry between them is one drag.
Per-person access you can revoke. When a contractor leaves, I remove their access to the shared folder and they lose everything in it. No password rotation marathon.
A browser extension that isn’t slow. We’re not IT people. If autofill takes two seconds and a click, we stop using it and go back to the spreadsheet.
Recovery we understand. Two-person shops don’t have an IT department to reset things. If one of us forgets the master password, there needs to be a documented way back in, and it can’t be “email support and hope.”

I’m deliberately not naming the exact product in a way that reads like an ad, because the criteria matter more than the logo. Any manager that does those four things well will serve a small shop. Most cheap ones fail on the first two.

The setup that took an afternoon

Migrating from the spreadsheet was the tedious part. Roughly:

List every login the business touches, including the ugly ones (the payroll portal, the old email host, the domain renewal).
Change the genuinely dangerous passwords as we go: banking, email, anything with money attached. Old reused passwords are the real risk, not the spreadsheet itself.
Set up shared folders by function: Money, Clients, Infrastructure. Then stop thinking about who has what.
Turn on two-factor everywhere the vault supports it. The manager protects the passwords, not your account if someone gets your master password.

Budget half a day. Most of it is chasing down logins you forgot existed.

What still annoys me

Autofill breaks on some sites, usually the banks and the older government portals, exactly the places you most want it to work. We keep the master password memorized for those and type it manually. Not ideal, not a dealbreaker.

The subscription is a recurring cost for something a spreadsheet did for free. I’ve made peace with it because the cost of one compromised business bank account dwarfs a year of password manager fees. But it’s a real line item, and worth deciding on deliberately rather than drifting into.

And no password manager fixes the human part. If your partner sets the master password to something guessable, the whole thing is theater. Pick a long passphrase, write it on paper, lock the paper in a drawer. That’s less foolish than it sounds.

What I’d tell another two-person shop

Don’t overthink the brand. The features that matter are shared folders, revocable access, fast autofill, and a recovery path you’ve actually tested. Get those, migrate the money-and-email passwords first, and turn on two-factor while you’re in there.

The free managers bundled into antivirus tools are fine for one person. For two people running the books together, they’re the wrong tool, and you’ll feel it the first time you need to hand over a login without texting it.