u/Director-Busy

This is my honest feedback of using Proton Pass for a year.

It was my primary password manager for a year. I started the journey the same month last year. As a product, Proton Pass is a really solid one. Nice UI, I am a fan of good UI products, with essential features and the cost is reasonable as always. I was deeply into SimpleLogin as well which is now part of Proton Pass. But that is not where the story gets interesting.

My journey started from no password manager at the very beginning. It was like 10 to 15 credentials so I managed them myself by writing down on notes. But tech got improved and I needed to store credentials with device sync.

So I started using Google Password Manager. Later I had to use multiple browsers due to work and personal life, so I needed a third party password manager. Someone at work suggested Bitwarden, so I started using that. It was free, open source and good enough for my usage. But from the very first day, the UI was not what I expected from a seven years old (I started using it in 2023) product. Surely it is capable to manage passwords, but not one of my favourite apps.

Later I got this cool purple product. I was using Proton Mail free for quite a long time, though not too much invested. But when I started using Proton Pass free, I started liking the UI from the beginning. It looked like a modern (I started using it in 2024.) UI with cool purple colors (I love purple). I was on free tier to explore before committing anything and I was still integrated with Bitwarden. But in 2025 I thought to try premium for a year, mainly because of SimpleLogin which got integrated into Proton Pass itself. I use lots of aliases and later bought a domain to connect with it. After purchasing premium I purged the Bitwarden vault and started keeping KeePass as backup with Proton Pass as primary.

But when I made Proton Pass my primary password manager, things got interesting.

I try different browsers at different times just to play with it. I keep Firefox as primary and hop here and there. So whenever I log in Proton Pass somewhere, it gets irritating. I need to log into the whole account including Proton Mail, Proton Drive, VPN, everything. And even worse, you can log into SimpleLogin via Proton as well by clicking "Login with Proton" button. Also I cannot use the extension without logging into the browser account, and I am not comfortable with that. Suppose I am using Zen or Helium, I have to log into my main Proton account just to access my vault. That made me so concerned that I became skeptical about where to use the password manager and where not to. I cannot log into my mail on every browser, I am just not comfortable with that.

Even worse, I once had to log into my vault on my TL's desktop and could not find any way to share credentials, unlike Bitwarden which lets you share text or a file via link to any email. I got super annoyed logging into the whole account and later had to remove it from my Proton security dashboard.

So I started moving my SimpleLogin domain aliases to my own custom domain. Along with that I exported a copy to Bitwarden and started using it as my primary again. I am still not a fan of Bitwarden's UI and UX, it bothers me so much. But the security concern I have, I cannot overlook that unfortunately. Currently I am still in the transition period. I will renew another year just for SimpleLogin and will keep Proton Pass as backup because I really like the UI.

Overall I am a fan of Proton and what they are doing. But I cannot let my whole password manager be connected to my entire privacy ecosystem. I am not used to it and not comfortable either. If they allow in future to use Proton Pass as a separate service, at least as an option, I will come back as primary. Till then I will use it as a test account on the free tier.

And yes I know about the extra password option, but that does not change my situation. I am not worried about unauthorized login. I am worried about logging into my personal account anywhere it does not need to be. I like to keep my personal things private.