I’ve been a longtime (7 or more years, I think) user of the free and open-source Password Safe password manager and have never hesitated in recommending it to friends and family. I’ve always appreciated its simplicity and ease of use and it has served me well up till now.

Enter the year 2007, I have amassed slightly over 300 sets of credentials (both personal and work related) nicely arranged within groups and subgroups. The grouping is mostly used to hold passwords for the many servers I administer that each have many system, mail and database credentials and the grouping is important for me to know which website/domain resides on which server for example. Managing groups in Password Safe has been a nightmare! Here are some of my grouses with it:

  • I use the nested tree mode view and there is no way to keep the entire password list permanently expanded.
  • It uses the dot character as a separator for groups and subgroups, e.g. MainGroup.SubGroup.SubSubGroup. This prevents me from having my server hostnames (e.g. myhost.mydomain.com) as a group name. Also, within the edit entry dialog box, the Group text field is too small to fully display an entry that is nested within multiple subgroups.
  • I can’t attach visual icons to groups. I need to able to quickly distinguish between myhost.mydomain.com and myhost2.mydomain.com.

Well, here’s where KeePass comes to my rescue. KeePass is another popular free and open-source password manager and it’s just as easy to use. It not only solves all the issues I mentioned above but goes beyond that by throwing in some rather nifty features.

I’ve known of KeePass’ existence for while now but have resisted making the change as an earlier attempt to migrate to it proved to be too difficult - KeePass can import a Password Safe v2 database in plain-text format but it gets messed up when the list has a deep sub-grouping structure. This time round I had just set aside 2 hours of my time and migrated it manually entry by entry. I did manage to purge redundant entries at the same time so it wasn’t all that bad (okay, give me a break, I need to justify wasting 2 hours of my time doing banal work :p).

Here are some of the things I like about KeePass besides it negating all the problems I mentioned above:

  • Its Windows Explorer like interface makes much better use of screen real-estate and its entry view pane at the bottom of the screen lets me see all the details I need for an individual entry without having to open it up.
  • Its use of alternate row colors for entries makes it easy on the eyes for long lists.
  • I can export just a group of credentials instead of a whole list and set a new master password for it. This is great for me as I occasionally need to share my work related credentials with my colleagues.

So, in conclusion, Password Safe is still a decent app but only if you have a small list of passwords to manage. Once your list starts to grow, it will be a pain to use. If you’re just starting out with a password manager, I suggest you opt for KeePass. Note that I didn’t touch on the encryption algorithms that each of these apps use because I’m more concerned with the manageability of the password list. In any case, both support the Twofish encryption algorithm (KeePass also supports AES).