roboform password manager review
RoboForm is one of the oldest password managers out there, and after 20 years remains a solid competitor in the market.
RoboForm has raised its yearly subscription price since we last reviewed the service, to $24/year from $20/year, but other password managers have too, and RoboForm remains one of the cheaper paid options among the best password managers.
The standalone desktop app remains a poor experience on RoboForm, but the website interface, mobile apps, and browser extensions have gone through a significant redesign that gives the service a much more modern feel. RoboForm still remains among the best at form-filling.
Overall, RoboForm’s paid plan is no-nonsense and effective and will manage your passwords and personal information without much flash or fuss. It doesn’t offer much more than the Bitwarden free tier, and you can get newer features with the Keeper paid plan, but RoboForm is a dependable option that shouldn’t disappoint you.
Costs and what’s covered
RoboForm offers a free tier and a paid subscription called RoboForm Everywhere. The latter is one of the cheaper paid offerings among password managers at $23.88 per year for a single user. You can bring down that cost by 10% with a three-year plan ($64.44) or by 16% with a five-year plan ($99.50).
A family of up to five users can be covered for $47.75 a year. Again, you can save 10% with a three-year plan ($128.85) or 16% with a five-year plan ($199.00). At the time of this writing, Tom’s Guide readers got a 30% discount off the one-year individual and family plans.
RoboForm has a reasonably good free tier, with the ability to save unlimited passwords, generate strong passwords, autofill web forms, audit your passwords and be alerted of compromised ones, send passwords securely, receive emergency access to another RoboForm user’s account, log in to desktop applications and manage bookmarks.
The biggest advantage of paid accounts is the ability to sync your passwords and other items across all of your devices, which is crucial for most users.
Additional perks for paying users include cloud backup, a secured shared folder, two-factor authentication (2FA) support, the ability to grant emergency access to another RoboForm user, web access to your data and priority 24/7 support. In January 2022, it added a 2FA authenticator/code generator to its desktop apps, and that feature is coming soon to the RoboForm mobile apps.
RoboForm still offers a local-only storage option, a valuable option for users who don’t wish to, or are not allowed to, store their data in the cloud. Enabling it simply requires turning off automatic sync. Just be aware that the mobile apps lack the ability to turn off automatic syncing.
Setup
To get started, just navigate to the RoboForm downloads page. It will recognize the device that you are browsing from and recommend the correct version. The universal installer for macOS and Windows will also install the full-featured browser extensions for all supported browsers.
Now you need to create your account, which requires just an email address and a master password. RoboForm requires that the master password be at least 8 characters long with a minimum of 4 non-numeric characters. As with most password managers, there is no way to recover this master password if you lose it.
If you were already using some other method of password management, either in your browser or with another stand-alone password manager, you should import your data.
RoboForm on the desktop
RoboForm gives you four different ways to access your account on the desktop: the standalone app, the browser extension, the menu bar and the website. The functionality is largely the same among the four, which is an improvement; the last time I reviewed RoboForm, the website was a read-only experience.
The standalone desktop app has the worst user interface and user experience of the four. There is nothing to it visually, with just the eight sections of the app displayed in the left column.
If you click on a section, you get two additional columns with the relevant data to the right. The Security Center is the lone exception, as it has a slightly more modern tabbed interface.
Read More: https://www.tomsguide.com/reviews/roboform