How to share passwords securely with your team

How to share passwords securely with the team, step by step

1. Find where shared logins live now: spreadsheets, documents, chat threads and email.
2. Choose a business password manager and set up vaults by team or function.
3. Import the shared logins, then change every password that was ever sent in plain text.
4. Give each person the vaults their role needs, and turn on two-step sign-in for the manager itself.
5. Delete the old spreadsheets and messages that held passwords.
6. Add removing vault access to your checklist for people who leave.

What to look for

Editorial assessment

• Shared vaults by role You should be able to share a vault with a group and see at a glance who can open what.
• One-step offboarding Removing a person should end their access to every shared vault at once. Test it during the trial.
• Admin recovery Check how an admin restores access when someone forgets their master password or leaves, so the company never loses its logins.
• Browser and phone apps If filling in logins is awkward, staff drift back to spreadsheets. Test on the browsers and phones your team uses.
• Activity log A log of who viewed or changed a shared login helps you work out what happened when something goes wrong.
• Single sign-on If your team signs in through your office suite, check which plan tier includes single sign-on.

What to settle before you buy

• Who needs which shared logins, grouped by role?
• Who will be the admins, and who is the backup?
• Do contractors or clients need any shared logins, and for how long?
• Which browsers, phones and operating systems must it work on?
• Should people sign in to it through your office suite accounts?

How we built this page

We start from the job, not the product. The phrasings people search for this job (for example “password manager for business”) come from our research into how small and mid-size teams describe it. Which software categories the job takes is our editorial judgment. Every tool, entry price, billing unit and date comes from HelpCompare’s open dataset, recorded from each vendor’s own pricing page; nothing is estimated, and where a vendor publishes no price we say so. We take no affiliate commissions and publish no scores of our own. See our methodology or download the data from Open Data.

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