Norton Password Manager is a free password manager from the company best known for its antivirus software. Used by over four million people, Norton Password Manager helps you take control of your online credentials and minimize the risk of your passwords becoming compromised.
In our Norton Password Manager review, we pit the software against the best password managers available today to decide whether Norton Password Manager is the top choice for password management.
Features and utilities
Besides storing your passwords, Norton Password Manager gives you some basic metrics on them, listing weak, duplicate, and old passwords that you should change. However, there’s no information available on whether the email addresses and passwords you’ve used have been a part of a data breach.
Autochange is an interesting feature that lets you update the password stored on a site with just one click. It automatically goes through all the steps you’d normally have to perform to change the password. Unfortunately, it only worked about half of the time in our testing, returning an error for the rest.
Setup
Getting started with Norton Password Manager is simple, as the product is largely web-based. You create a Norton user account and set a unique password for your password vault.
Most users will also install the browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Internet Explorer. These extensions offer to save and fill in website passwords automatically. Norton Password Manager apps for iOS and Android are available from the respective app stores.
There’s a downloadable Norton Password Manager application specifically for importing passwords from Chrome and Firefox. You can also import passwords from Dashlane, LastPass, and 1Password files, making transferring everything to Norton Password Manager easy.
Interface and performance
We liked Norton Password Manager’s interface, which runs locally in a browser extension. It’s organized cleanly, with sites itemized in a grid or list format. Separate sections for logins, wallet, addresses, and notes keep all your personal details organized. A safety dashboard feature gives you an overview of your passwords and their relative strengths, and there’s a password generator to help create unique passwords.
When you enter user credentials on a new website, Norton Password Manager will ask whether to store the details in the vault.
Security
Norton Password Manager has a robust set of security features that put it on par with the best password managers. Your data is stored in the cloud using 256-bit AES encryption. All connections from the browser to the cloud vault are made through TLS secure connections. The only way to unlock your vault data is with the vault password, which is never stored or sent anywhere. Even better, if you install the Norton Password Manager app on your mobile device, two-factor authentication is available.
Support
Norton has an extensive support site, but very little of it is dedicated to Norton Password Manager. There are a basic FAQ and some documents that take you through some features, but these mostly lack screenshots and only occasionally have videos. Searching for help on topics often returns results about other products.
There is a support forum with a few posts per day, but Norton Password Manager shares this forum with Norton Safe Web and Norton Safe Search, making finding solutions for problems difficult. Most user problems go unsolved.
We tested the 24/7 live chat by asking a few simple questions about the product to the support agent. Although the live chat was responsive, the agent didn’t seem trained on the product and couldn’t answer our basic queries.
Plans and pricing
Norton Password Manager is a free tool, but when you log in, the site lists your subscription status as Trial. This could concern those looking for a free-for-life product, as Norton software such as Norton AntiVirus Basic and Norton Security were initially available as complimentary trials only to be removed later, forcing users to upgrade to paid versions.
Though Norton Password Manager is free, the Norton website gently pushes you to purchase it as part of a security suite package with a subscription. A bewildering number of options are presented, as Norton offers at least 20 unique products and just as many ways to pay for them.
The flagship product is Norton 360, a subscription-based security suite that includes antivirus protection, a firewall, cloud backup, a VPN, and password management. The Standard plan costs $39.99 for the first year and $79.99 for subsequent years. Moving up, the Deluxe plan ($49.99 for the first year and $99.99/year ongoing) can be used on up to five devices and has 50GB cloud backup storage.
You can pay an extra $50/year for 50GB more of cloud storage and identity theft monitoring, or choose the Ultimate Plus plan (an eye-watering $349.99 annually after the first year) for 500GB of cloud storage, credit card activity alerts, and court record scanning.
The competition
LastPass offers a free account with more features than Norton Password Manager, such as one-to-one sharing of passwords, audit reports, and a better password generator. If you’re willing to pay $3/month for a premium account, LastPass adds features like priority tech support, advanced multi-factor options, and one-to-many sharing of passwords.
Final verdict
Norton Password Manager works quite well as a basic password manager, but it doesn’t feel that the free software is a priority to Norton. The Autochange feature is neat when it works, and we have little doubt our passwords are secure with Norton, but there’s nothing here that other free password managers don’t do better.
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