Benefits of Family Online vs. What we Have Now

iankh

We are long time 1Password users and have had the app on our Macs, almost since it was first released, and later on our mobile devices. This may be a dumb question, but what are the benefits of a family account over what we have now? Our devices currently synch (using icloud) and so it's extremely rare that a password does not appear shortly it has been added to one of the devices? I sort of wish your website showed a side by side comparison of the benefits of 1Password family account vs. locally stored vaults synced over iCloud or one of the other supported services.

Is the only benefit that we can have a shared vault?

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1Password Version: Version 6.8.1 (681005)
Extension Version:_ Not Provided
OS Version: Mac 10.12.6
Sync Type: iCloud

Corey_C

Hey there @iankh :)
That's not a dumb question at all and I'd be happy to outline some of the benefits for you.

The main purpose of the 1Password Families specifically, as opposed to a 1Password.com membership in general is, as you said, to facilitate sharing. There is the shared vault where you can put things you want the entire family to have access to. And it's not just passwords. You can put things like wills, passports, life insurance information, financial information and various such other things that would be important for other family members to have access to. But the shared vault isn't the only one you can use. The thing with the subscription accounts is that you can have as many vaults as you want, each shared with however many family members that you want, or shared with nobody. If you only wanted to share things with a certain family member, you can do that.

There are also other benefits to membership accounts in general, such as access to the 1Password apps on as many devices as you own, including all upgrades. When 1Password 7 comes out, if you remain standalone, you will have to purchase it again on each of your devices separately. Not so with the membership. Benefits of the membership accounts in general are outlined here:

What are the benefits of a 1Password membership?

I hope that clears up your questions. Let me know if I can help with anything else. :)
Corey

iankh

It does, thanks!

Ben

Hi @iankh

Thanks for taking the time to write in.

1Password uses Apple's CloudKit technology to sync with iCloud. CloudKit does for databases what iCloud Drive does for files. The downside is that CloudKit has no inherent ability to share data. It is only intended to be used by one person. And in fact there is no way to share CloudKit data across different Apple IDs. So while it may work for you (and great if it does) it was never really designed to do that, and as with any situation where you're using a system in a way it was never designed to handle you may encounter difficulties outside the scope of what we can help with if doing so.

1Password Families on the other hand was designed specifically with sharing in mind. In fact the ability to easily share data was one of the design goals and primary motivations behind us building the service.

But as Corey mentioned it isn't all about syncing/sharing. While it does do that, and does it better than any existing solution, it offers a fair bit more as well. You can read more about some of the benefits here:

What are the benefits of a 1Password membership?

One of the things I love about it is that all of my family members always have access to all of the latest versions of the 1Password apps for all of their devices. I don't have to worry about if Mom & Dad have updated their 1Password for Mac license to the latest version.

I hope that helps!

Ben