How good is Dashlane to change all passwords in the face of major data breaches?
Fed up trying to manage dozens of passwords for all your various accounts and apps? On average, it is estimated that you will have 26 online accounts. If you are following recommended passphrase practices, that means 26 passwords to keep track of. And that’s only an average user; power users will have dozens more account and app passwords to manage.
Although it’s a pain, a unique password for every account remains the best line of defense against being hacked. Admittedly, it is easy for experts (including us) to advise you to have a unique password for each and every account and to change them often. However, actually applying these measures even to just a few accounts can quickly become a nightmare.
And with barely a week going by without a significant data breach being reported (and many more probably going unreported), the ability to change all passwords FAST becomes more important than ever.
Fortunately, managing all your passwords doesn’t have to be difficult or risky. Dashlane makes a breeze of creating, managing and changing your passwords, even changing all of them.
Dashlane at a Glance
Dashlane is absolutely free if you only want to use it on a single device (Android, PC, Mac or iOS). Its automated password changer prompts you to change all passwords of crucial online accounts frequently, ensuring high level of security.
The premium version of Dashlane synchronizes all your passwords across your different devices bringing them all under one roof. It also allows you to create a protected backup of your information, which you can then access from any web browser.
Dashlane’s premium version costs $39.99 per year and may seem expensive when you consider free options like Lastpass, but Dashlane is worth every penny for its automated change all passwords feature and its easy linking to your Google account for secure double-authentication.
In-depth Review of Dashlane
As we’ve seen, Dashlane is a top-rated password manager that keeps your accounts secure and saves you the trouble of memorizing and changing several complicated passwords. Let’s examine Dashlane in more detail.
Set Up
It is easy to set up and has an intuitive interface, plugging seamlessly into different browsers. If you have been saving your passwords in your browser, Dashlane will import them and erase them from your unsafe browser storage. It is also possible to import data from other password managers. If you don’t have any password data to import, don’t worry. Just keep accessing your accounts as usual, and Dashlane will automatically save your usernames and passwords as you login to them and automatically save data for any new accounts you create.
Features
Dashlane comes with all the features you’d expect from a password manager app it but comes with a host of other bonus features too.
Strong Password Generator
Dashlane’s best feature is that you will never again need to worry about changing your passwords manually. Dashlane has a strong password generator that will do the work for you.
The data Dashlane stores is protected by top-of-the-line AES-256 encryption and kept on industry-leading Amazon AWS servers with 24/7/365 security monitoring.
With Dashlane, the only password you’ll need to memorize is your Master Password. But do be careful: you’ll be solely responsible for storing it in your own brain, because Dashlane does not store Master Passwords. Again, this is for your own protection. But this also means that if you do forget your Master Password, you will have to start over, as Dashlane will be unable to help you in any way.
Top Tip – The best way to stay ultimately secure is to link Dashlane with Google Authenticator. This will provide two-factor authentication for higher security by sending you a text on your phone with a code every time you log-in.
Password Storage
Dashlane captures your password as you log into any of your accounts. You can access your saved browser passwords through clicking on the Dashlane toolbar button. Unlike many other password managers, Dashlane also maintains a history of all your password changes.
When you need to generate a new password, Dashlane can do this for you. If instead you want to manually create a password, Dashlane can still help in the process. If you are not in the mood of creating a new password just yet, Dashlane will do it for you once you click the impala button. You can also manually generate passwords through selecting the password generator tab. It creates 8-character passwords comprising of letters and digits, which you can tweak with a little effort if you want to. It also displays the password strength so that you can easily decide which password is most appropriate.
Auto-log In
Once Dashlane has saved a password, logging in to your accounts and apps becomes a breeze with Dashlane’s auto-login feature. You will wonder how you ever lived without it!
Automatic Password Changer
Dashlane has the ability to change one, some or even all of your passwords at a single click.
Changing your passwords regularly is a key feature of online security and identity theft prevention that too few of us are doing. It’s more important than ever with large scale data breaches even of big companies on the rise.
Dashlane’s automatic password changer automates the process of changing your passwords. This feature now works for over 240 accounts including the most popular websites.
Easy Sharing of Passwords
Another feature worth mentioning is Dashlane’s password sharing. This allows you to temporarily grant access to your important accounts to your family, friends or colleagues (for example, in case of an emergency) without you actually sharing the password with them. Pretty cool!
Auto-Fill
In addition to passwords, you can save other sensitive data, such as credit card information, addresses, etc. and enjoy a convenient auto-fill feature for online forms.
Online Shopping Security
Doing online shopping? Dashlane saves virtual receipts of your transactions so that you can refer to them in the future. You can also save these receipts with personal notes such as “5 day money back guarantee or delivery within 24 hours”.
It can also save screenshots during your transaction, which can be helpful to tackle future disputes or disagreements.
Password Syncing
If you sign up for Dashlane Premium, your password vault is synced across all your Macs, PCs, iPhones and Android phones. Alternatively, you could install the free copy on each machine, and just export your password collection from one computer to the other, using the steps on the Dashlane Web site.
Cost
The basic version of Dashlane is free. The premium version is $39.99 a year. The big benefit of the premium version is that Dashlane will sync your password information across all your various devices. Dashlane supports PC, Android, Mac and iOS. The premium version also gives you access to secure account backups, unlimited secure password sharing, web access to your password database (so you can access it anywhere at anytime from any web browser) and priority customer support.
Drawbacks
The only major downside of Dashlane from our perspective is that it’s not open source. It’s proprietary and therefore suffers from the same disadvantage of all non-open source apps: the software code is not open for inspection or scrutiny and therefore may contain vulnerabilities or backdoor exploits.
Change all Passwords with a Single Click Wrap-Up
Apart from that, the free version of Dashlane is a no-brainer. Even the premium version of Dashlane is worth every penny of its modest price. However, we would much prefer Dashlane premium charged a one-time fee, like most software apps, rather than an annual fee.
is this program compatable with Microsoft windows
Thanks for your comment. Yes, Dashlane is compatible with Microsoft Windows. In fact, it works on Mac, Windows, iOS and Android. This is one of its key features: you can sync up your passwords across all your devices: desktop computers, laptop computers, smart phones and tablets.