Password managers for teams: real costs
A five-person studio and a 200-seat agency face the same question: which password manager actually solves credential sharing, and what will it cost once SSO, admin seats and setup time enter the invoice? Every vendor advertises a clean per-user number. Few mention that the advertised tier often excludes single sign-on, directory sync or monthly billing. This piece compares what six widely used tools charge today, what each price actually includes, and where the real cost appears after the trial ends.
The tools below made the list because each publishes a documented business tier with a verifiable per-seat price, and each represents a distinct trade-off: lowest entry cost, broadest SSO coverage, open-source flexibility, or self-hosted control. Tools without public business pricing were left out rather than estimated.
### 1Password Business
1Password Business costs $8.99 per user per month when billed annually, or $107.88 per user per year, while the Teams Starter Pack costs $24.95 per month when billed annually and includes 10 members. The Business tier adds role-based vault sharing and permissions, Watchtower alerts, and integration with Okta, Entra ID, OneLogin, and Duo. Every Business seat also includes a complimentary Families plan for personal use, worth $53.88 a year. The Business plan documentation lists it as serving 5 to 20 users; organisations above that must move to custom Enterprise pricing, which is not published.
### Bitwarden Teams and Enterprise
Bitwarden's work plans price Teams at $4 per user a month and Enterprise at $6 per user, both billed annually, with Enterprise adding SSO, SCIM, and self-hosting. The catch sits in the billing terms. Prices exclude tax, and the paid tiers bill yearly only, so a 10-person Teams org pays $480 for the year in one go rather than spreading the cost monthly. That is fine for a budgeted annual renewal, less fine for a team that wants to cancel mid-year.
### Dashlane Business
Dashlane for Business starts at $8 per user per month billed annually for the Business plan, with the Omnix tier at $11 per user per month. The Business plan includes single sign-on integration, SCIM provisioning, and a free family plan for each user. Like Dashlane's individual and family plans, the business tiers are sold only as one-year subscriptions. That structure suits a company with a fixed annual security budget, less so a startup still testing headcount.
### Keeper Business
Keeper starts at $2 per user per month, undercutting both 1Password and Dashlane at entry level. That low published rate is the reason Keeper shows up on nearly every comparison chart. Before signing, confirm in writing which tier that $2 figure covers: entry pricing from security vendors frequently excludes SSO and directory sync, which then arrive as a separate line item once procurement asks for the actual contract.
### LastPass Business
LastPass Business works out to roughly $4,200 a year for 50 seats, or about $7 per user per month. That sits between Bitwarden's Enterprise rate and Dashlane's Business tier. LastPass suffered a major vault data breach in 2022 that exposed encrypted customer backups, a history that still shapes procurement conversations even for teams evaluating the current product on price alone.
### Vaultwarden (self-hosted Bitwarden)
Teams with their own server operations can run Bitwarden self-hosted for free, or deploy the Vaultwarden community fork on a $5 to $10 a month VPS. There is no per-seat fee at that point, only hosting and maintenance. This option fits a team that already runs its own infrastructure and accepts the trade-off: no vendor support line, and patching, backups and uptime become the IT admin's job.
How to choose between them
Match the decision to seat count and compliance need rather than to the lowest sticker price. A team under 10 people rarely needs SSO, so Bitwarden Teams at $4 per seat or 1Password's Teams Starter Pack covers the basics cheaply. A company of 50 to 200 that must prove SSO and SCIM to an auditor should compare 1Password Business and Dashlane Business line by line, since both bundle directory integration at the published rate rather than as an add-on. A team with its own sysadmin and a tolerance for self-support can run Vaultwarden for the cost of a small VPS.
Before signing anything, ask the vendor in writing whether the quoted per-seat price includes SSO, SCIM and audit logs, or whether those sit behind a higher tier. Run the 14-day trial with a real admin workflow: add a user, revoke a user, generate an audit report. Then price the contract at your actual seat count, not the marketing tier, and set a calendar reminder two months before the annual renewal so idle seats get cut before the invoice renews automatically.
